This is the Opening Night of the 39th Chicago Latino Film Festival. Price includes food and drink reception prior to film showing of Love & Mathematics (Amor y Matemáticas) at 7pm. Cocktail/Evening attire is strongly recommended.
Eleven-year-old Lucía’s family lives a precarious life in Lake Coatepeque in El Salvador. Includes Short Film Silences of Childhood.
After not speaking to each other in years, siblings Mateo, Belén and María José meet to sign the sale documents of their childhood home in western Uruguay. But when Mateo’s car breaks down in the middle of the night, the trio have no choice but to stay at a cozy country hotel where old disagreements and conflicts come to the surface. Includes Short Film All in Favor.
Told in real time, "The Punishment" opens with two parents searching for their missing boy in a Chilean forest. Minutes earlier, Ana (Antonia Zegers) and Mateo (Néstor Cantillana) had left their 7-year-old son alone by the side of the road for misbehaving. As they look for him with the help of a local police officer, the couple will face some uncomfortable truths about their relationship and their role as parents.
The town 65-year-old Domingo calls home is being threatened by developers who want to construct a highway that will cross right through it. Most of the residents have left, but Domingo refuses to sell his land. The recent widower believes his wife visits him regularly in the shape of a mist. He will resort to any means necessary to protect his home. Escalante Meza’s third feature film was Costa Rica’s official entry for Best International Feature at the 95th Academy Awards.
Héctor returns to his village after working abroad for years to discover that it is now under the control of an evangelical preacher and that there is a lack of job opportunities. His wife despises him for having abandoned her for so long and his young child doesn’t recognize him. Héctor has become an outcast. He decides to reclaim his life even if it means burning down anything or anyone tied to his past.
Inspired by real events, Chile’s official selection for the Academy Award for Best International Feature centers on Blanquita, an 18-year-old single mother who, encouraged by Manuel (Alejandro Goic), the priest who runs the foster home she lives in, becomes a key witness in the case against a child prostitution and pedophilia network run by a well-known businessman. Includes Short Film Baby (Colombia).
The first Puerto Rican-produced film to premiere at Sundance, Chicago-based multidisciplinary artist Marrero Sánchez’s feature debut follows ailing artist Noelia who, after learning that her cancer has metastasized, leaves her partner behind in San Juan and moves in with her mother on the island municipality of Vieques. She keeps secret her condition so she can live life on her own terms, including joining in the efforts to document the toxic legacy of the U.S. military exercises in the island.
Winner of the Critics’ Week Grand Prize in the Cannes Film Festival and nominated to a Goya for Best Iberoamerican Film, Ramírez Pulido’s feature debut begins with a murder: best friends Eliú and Mono have killed a man they mistake for Eliú’s father. Eliú is sent to an experimental institution deep in the heart of Colombia’s tropical forests, where he performs manual labor and endures group therapy under the watchful eye of guard Godoy. Includes Short Film - One Way Journey (Dominican Republic).
Six Cuban filmmakers, under the editorial guidance of Fernando Pérez ("Suite Havana"), craft seven stories about Cuba in the time of COVID: A little girl tries to protect one of her two great possessions: a dove; Paloma arrives at the decaying house that someone, upon departing, left her, the pattern of the walls telling as many stories as the poultry farm in an inner room; after being released from prison, Ernesto begins to work at a cinema shuttered by the pandemic; Mara delivers drinks to people’s homes; Gaby spends the lockdown taking photographs from her balcony; Gallo, a temperamental trumpeter, disturbs his neighbors with his playing.
Belmonte’s "Rashomon"-like thriller finds newly appointed police chief Josué (Lázaro Ramos, "Madame Sata") investigating the murder of a local politician in a coastal town of Bahía. Includes Short Film - Bedwetter (Peru)
Guatemala’s official selection for Best International Feature at the 95th Academy Awards, Anaïs Taracena’s documentary tells the daring story of journalist Elías Barahona, "El topo", who in the 1970s infiltrated General Romeo García’s dictatorship posing as a press officer for the Ministry of the Interior. As such, he was able to retrieve and release information about human rights abuses even as his closest friends were convinced that he was a traitor. Includes Short Film - Fifth of June.