Latin grammar

The Latino Film Fest once again reaches for a large and underserved audience.

As local film festivals go, the Chicago Latino Film Festival, now in its 24th year, has a lot of ground to cover. While the Irish Film Fest handles a single nation smaller than Maine, and the Lesbian and Gay Film Fest can limit itself by subject matter, the Latino Film Fest has to survey at least 23 countries (all of Central and South America, Portugal and Spain, plus the U.S.) with an incredibly rich and diverse set of cultures.

Just how exactly does a festival contain all of the following under one tent: A comedy about a Jewish family in Mexico sitting shivah (My Mexican Shivah); a Brazilian drama in Portuguese that weaves five plotlines (5 fracoes de uma quase historia); a Chilean documentary about the Palestinian national soccer team (Tiro libre); and a Puerto Rican crime drama full of corrupt cops and bomb-rigged cars (Ángel)? For the Latino Film Fest, the answer is to stress diversity, program extensively (more than 100 films if you count features and shorts) and reach out to the various constituencies that make up the Latino audience. That means that Pepe Vargas and the staff at the International Latino Cultural Center have to be skilled diplomats, balancing the representation of various nations and territories. It’s not an accident that the closing-night film is from Puerto Rico and that there is a special Noche Mexicana event showcasing a film from Mexico. According to census statistics, Mexican-Americans and Puerto Ricans are the two largest groups in Chicago’s Latino population.

That’s not to say that the chosen films aren’t worthy. El viaje de la nonna, which is featured in the Noche Mexicana event, is a charming family heartwarmer that recalls the German comedy Good Bye Lenin! A Mexican family faces a tricky situation when grandmother Nonna, whose memory is failing but who seems ready to hold on for years, insists on a trip to Italy to visit her late husband’s hometown. Rather than go to all that trouble, the kids decide to fake the trip. They take Nonna to a small Mexican town dressed up in Italian drag. The idea may not be all that original, but director Sebastián Silva handles the material with an appropriately light touch, and the cast knows how to modulate between broad and sentimental moments.

We could have used a bit less broadness in My Mexican Shivah, which tracks the usual comical family woes familiar from My Big Fat Greek Wedding and all the “ethnic families are funny” comedies that have followed in its wake. This time, the family is Mexican and Jewish. If you’ve seen a single Jewish family comedy made in the last decade, you can imagine the klezmer music and the gags about the younger generation marrying outside the faith.

On a more serious note, Ventura Pons’s Barcelona (A Map) takes a concept that feels rather stage-bound (it’s basically five two-person dialogue scenes) and keeps us intrigued with the twists and turns of the relationships. An elderly couple is evicting the boarders who rent rooms in their sprawling apartment. The husband reminds a female language teacher of the date she has to leave, and they end up discussing opera. The wife plays mother to a troubled security guard who rents another of their rooms, and they talk about his failed marriage and soccer. And so it goes. Pons builds tension until the final scene, between the husband and wife, explains some big mysteries that have been raised while throwing in a few bizarre twists.

The closing night film Ángel feels too much like a low-budget attempt at a Hollywood thriller, complete with bombastic musical score. The plot, which follows a corrupt cop and the “radical” he put in prison, is strictly by-the-numbers, but director and star Jacobo Morales gives a nice performance as the wronged man. Even our limited sampling suggests that the Latino Film Festival has some solid offerings. The challenge is wading through 100 films to find them.

The Chicago Latino Film Festival runs Friday 4 through April 16.

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