Highlighted Films
The Milk of Sorrow
Director: Claudia Llosa
Country: Peru
Year: 2009
Genre: Drama
This movie explores the consequences of physical and psycological trauma not only in the assaulted victim but also in her descendants. Fausta, the protagonist, is a very shy and scared young indigenous woman who is trying to earn enough money to give her mother a proper burial. Her family believes Fausta suffers from a disease called "the milk of sorrow," transferred to her by her mother wile breastfeeding. Her mother had been raped while she was pregnant with Fausta, her father had been brutally mutilated and killed, and Fausta now lives her life in fear and suffers from severe health problems in an effort to protect herself from being raped as her mother was.
Cassandra
Director: Inés de Oliveira Cézar
Country: Argentina
Year: 2012
Genre: Road movie
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Cassandra combines fiction and documentary to present the reality of the empoverished and abandoned region of El Chaco, in Argentina. Cassandra, the main character, is a solitary young woman from Buenos Aires who has recently completed her studies in journalism and faces her first job assignment working as an intern at a newspaper. She prepares for her journey to El Chaco by interviewing some experts and doing research on the area. Then, she travels to the indigenous communities and observes how people live there. She interviews them and takes pictures, but she is incapable of sending her editor the kind of material he expects from a reporter. The reality she confronts will take her into a deeper personal journey from which she will never return.
Nora's Will
Director: Mariana Chenillo
Country: Mexico
Year: 2009
Genre: Comedy
Chenillo explained in an interview that this movie was inspired by her own grandmother's death. The film presents with some humor how a Jewish Mexican family deals with the suicide of the mother during the days prior to Passover. Some of the characters include an atheist ex-husband, a psychologist in love with his now dead patient, an absent son living with his spouse and his two young daughters in the US, an old Catholic maid and cook, and a shortsighted aunt who knows all the secrets of her deceased sister. Religion, family, death, jealousy, suicide, love, food, tradition, and time are several of the issues explored in this film.
The Camera Obscura
Director: María Victoria Menis
Country: Argentina
Year: 2008
Genre: Drama​
This film is splashed with creative pieces of animation and surrealist photography intertwined with the plot. Based on the short story "La cámara oscura" by Angélica Gorodischer, the film takes us back to the end of the 19th century and to the life of Gertrudis, a woman who lived in an Argentinian Jewish community in Entre Ríos. Born to a refugee family, neglected by her mother who considered her ugly, and ignored by her husband and children, Gertrudis nonetheless creates beauty in everything she does.
The Tiniest Place
Director: Tatiana Huezo
Country: El Salvador
Year: 2011
Genre: Documentry
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Can life grow in a place devastated by violence and unpunished crimes? Can people smile and keep on living when they have lost their most beloved family members? A plurality of testimonies, structured in fragmented pieces, tell personal stories of loss and military abuse during the Salvadoran Civil War of the 80s, a conflict that lasted 12 years and killed 75,000 people in the smallest and most densely populated country in Central America.