The 19th annual Chicago Latino Film Festival, presented by the International Latino Cultural Center of Chicago, continues Friday through Thursday, April 11 through 17. Film and video screenings will be at Association House, 2150 W. North; Beverly Arts Center, 2407 W. 111th St.; Biograph; Richard J. Daley College, 7500 S. Pulaski; Facets Cinematheque; I.C.E. Cinema, 2258 W. 62nd St.; Morton College, 3801 S. Central, Cicero; North Park University, 3225 W. Foster; Northwestern Univ. Block Museum of Art; Three Penny; and Univ. of Illinois at Chicago Lecture Center B2, 750 S. Halsted. Tickets for most programs are $9; $8 for students, senior citizens, and disabled persons; $7 for members of ILCC and the Illinois Arts Alliance. Festival passes, good for ten screenings not including special events, are $70, $60 for ILCC members. For more information call 312-409-1757. Films marked with an * are highly recommended; unless otherwise noted, all films are in Spanish with subtitles.
Mi casa, su casa
The early 20th-century bandit Jesus Negrete was mythologized as a Robin Hood figure in the contemporary Mexican broadside press, and this 2002 comic adventure by writer-director Alejandro Gamboa offers a sardonic, media-savvy take on his career. After wandering into town and saving a woman from her abusive husband, Negrete (Miguel Rodarte) is taken under the wing of a sly editor who promotes him as the righteous “Tiger of Santa Julia.” A gang of rebellious women accumulates around the handsome desperado, but then group sex leads to jealousy and a deadly betrayal. The overall tone of the film is too light to accommodate its frequently sadistic violence: think of The Wild Bunch with raven-haired babes standing in for Ernest Borgnine and Warren Oates. 120 min. (JJ) Gamboa and Rodarte will attend the screening. Showing as part of the festival’s “Noche Mexicana Fiesta”; tickets are $65, $50 for ILCC members, and include admission to a postscreening party. (Biograph, 6:30)
Southern Star
In 1982 the residents the Mayan village of Petanac were slain by the Guatemalan military, one of over 600 such massacres in a decades-long civil war. Canadian director Mary Ellen Davis documents the 2000 return of one of 13 escapees, Mateo Pablo, to the site of his family’s murder in this rambling but nonetheless searing 2002 video. A ceremonial reburial of bones exhumed from a mass grave, with chant-ing and candles, is deeply poignant, as is Pablo’s lament that the killers remain free “while the souls of others are broken by sadness.” Also shown is work by artist Daniel Hernandez-Salazar, whose photographs addressing the massacre–although inadequately reproduced–look intriguing. In Spanish and French with subtitles. 74 min. (FC) Also on the program: Gustav Tarretto’s Argentinean short Sunburn (2002, 15 min.). (Facets Cinematheque, 8:00)
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David Turnley’s 2001 documentary centers on a Havana night club, the Salon Rosada de La Tropical, but its real subject is Cuban attitudes about race, class, and nationalism. Shot in beautifully textured black-and-white video and then transferred to film, the movie has an intoxicating, sexually charged rhythm and seems sharply attuned to the lives of the impoverished black musicians, singers, and dancers who perform at the club. Unfortunately, it’s poorly structured, and the absence of a unifying shape significantly blunts its impact. 95 min. (Patrick Z. McGavin) (Biograph, 8:30)
Rancor
