The 28th Chicago Latino Film Festival runs Friday, April 13, through Thursday, April 26. Tickets for most screenings are $11, $10 for members of the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago; a festival pass, good for 12 general admissions, is $100, $80 for ILCC members. Following are selected screenings; for a full schedule see latinoculturalcenter.org.
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Captains of the Sands Like Hector Babenco’s Pixote (1981) and Fernando Meirelles’s City of God (2002), this Brazilian drama considers the abbreviated childhood of feral street kids. The source novel by modernist writer Jorge Amado was published in 1937; directors Cecilia Amado and Guy Goncalves have moved the action up to the 1950s but retain Amado’s favorite locale, the coastal city of Salvador, Bahia. Bala, leader of a gang of petty thieves who inhabit a ruined building on the ocean shore, wrestles with romantic feelings after reluctantly loosening the rules of membership to admit a pubescent girl. Early in the movie, a lovely scene of the gang riding a merry-go-round in town exposes the element that makes these stories so reliably potent: the ease with which young criminals can revert to a childlike vulnerability. In Portuguese with subtitles. —J.R. Jones 96 min. Screens on Wednesday, April 18, 6 PM, at 600 N. Michigan as part of the festival’s “Noite do Brasil” (tickets are $75, $65 for ILCC members, and include a reception after the screening), and again on Friday, April 20, 7:30 PM at Landmark’s Century Centre for regular admission.
Reus The title of this Uruguayan drama refers to a working-class barrio of Montevideo that’s become a center of gang activity in recent decades. That development informs the movie’s central conflict, as long-standing tensions between gang members and local merchants escalate into a full-on street war. The gangbanger characters and shaky, pseudo-documentary camerawork are both standard issue (directors Pablo Fernandez, Alejandro Pi, and Eduardo Pinero seem to have watched more than their share of The Wire), but the observations of barrio life are generally illuminating, focusing on the sort of neighborhood landmarks that are usually overlooked. The filmmakers even stage a few scenes in Uruguay’s oldest standing synagogue for a superfluous subplot that nonetheless conveys a strong sense of place. In Spanish with subtitles. —Ben Sachs 89 min. Sat 4/14, 6:15 PM, Instituto Cervantes, and Thu 4/26, 8:30 PM, Landmark’s Century Centre
