The provocative poster art for this year’s Chicago Latino Film Festival shows a border wall with a couple of sections that have been flattened by an advancing path of celluloid film. The image might seem particularly timely this year, given the steady progress of the Trump administration’s anti-immigrant agenda, but cinema has always provided a gateway between the U.S. and its southern neighbors. Politics takes front and center on opening night as well, when the festival presents the Puerto Rican comedy Broche de Oro: Beginnings (reviewed below). Released in September 2017, as the island was being hammered by Hurricane Irma and Hurricane Maria, this lightweight comedy reminds us of the emotional buoyancy of our beleaguered fellow citizens—many of whom still lack the electricity needed to watch it.
Dear Mom In this Brazilian melodrama, an uptight doctor leaves her husband for a female painter, further straining her contentious relationships with her mother and teenage daughter. Director Jeremias Moreira seems less concerned with the doctor’s sexual awakening than with her family ties, devoting much of the running time to dialogue-driven scenes in which the heroine and her mother ruminate on the past and dig up buried resentments. This is based on a play (by Maria Adelaida Amaral), and the stage origins show in all the worst ways: the performances are overstated, and the action feels cramped (even though the movie was shot in wide-screen). Still, the movie is fitfully insightful in depicting relationships between parents and children, showing how people carry issues from their formative years into adulthood. In Portuguese with subtitles. —Ben Sachs 95 min. Sun 4/15, 6:45 PM, and Tue 4/17, 8:45 PM.
The Summit Fleeing a scandal, the president of Argentina (Ricardo Darín) travels to the mountains of Chile to attend a conference and gets embroiled in a geopolitical power struggle. This Argentine political drama is straightforward and dry for its first act, then cowriter-director Santiago Mitre introduces a plot twist in which the president’s grown daughter finds herself able to recall events from before her birth while under hypnosis. This swerve into supernatural mystery turns out to be a mere detour, though, as the president returns to the conference and navigates his way out of an international conflict. Mitre, following up his Brechtian drama Paulina (2015), maintains that movie’s even-handed tone, presenting different sides to various arguments and making viewers decide where they stand, but the rhetoric is less compelling and the characters are less interesting. In English and subtitled Portuguese and Spanish. —Ben Sachs 114 min. Screens as part of the closing-night program; tickets are $60 and include a postscreening reception. Thu 4/19, 6 PM.
