Chico

Bolshe Vita won Ibolya Fekete a European Young Director of the Year award. His second feature holds much the same empathy for the displaced and itinerant, though with an evidently bigger budget it's much more travelled itself. Presented in a series of flashbacks (elements of the actor/character Flores' own history are incorporated in the story), this traces the ideological journey of a Bolivian-born communist idealist, son of a Jewish Hungarian intellectual and a Spanish Catholic, from nascent Latin American revolutionary, via Soviet-trained Hungarian secret agent and Spanish journalist in Albania and Israel, to resistance fighter battling in early '90s Croatia. The internationalism threatens to get out of hand - the Hungarian scenes are certainly opaque - but it's an idiosyncratic and intrepid film that raises cogent questions of identity and belief.