EL GENERAL by Natalia Almada - (Mexico) -  Past and present collide in this extraordinarily crafted film when filmmaker Natalia Almada (ALL WATER HAS A PERFECT MEMORY), winner of the US Directing Award: Documentary at the Sundance Film Festival, brings to life audio recordings she inherited from her grandmother. These recordings feature Alicia Calles’s reminiscences about her own father—Natalia’s great-grandfather—General Plutarco Elías Calles, a revolutionary general who became president of Mexico in 1924. In his time, Calles was called “El Bolshevique” and “El Jefe Máximo,” or “the foremost chief.” Today, he remains one of Mexico’s most controversial figures, illustrating both the idealism and injustices of the country’s history. Through Alicia’s voice, this visually stunning and stylistically innovative film moves between the conflicting memories of a daughter grappling with her remembrances of her father and his violent public legacy. Combining meticulously edited audio, haunting photographs, archival newsreels, and old Hollywood films with an original evocative soundtrack, sweeping footage of modern-day Mexico City, and interviews with today’s working poor, EL GENERAL is a poetic and cinematic exploration of historical judgment and a complex and arresting portrait of a family and country living under the shadows of the past.  Winner U.S. Directing Award: Documentary at Sundance 2009 and the Cine Las Americas, Audience Award, Best Documentary.  83 minutes

TONY MANERO by Pablo Larrain - (Chile) - As Augusto Pinochet holds Chile in the grip of dictatorship, a fifty year old man obsessed with John Travolta’s character from Saturday Night Fever imitates his idol each weekend in a small bar on the outskirts of Santiago. Each weekend, Raúl Peralta and his friends – a devoted group of dancers – gather in a small bar and act out their favorite scenes from the film. Raúl longs to become a showbiz superstar, and when the national television announces a Tony Manero impersonating contest it seems like he may finally have a shot at living his dreams. But as Raúl is driven to commit a series of crimes and thefts in order to reproduce his matinee idol’s persona, his dancing partners (also underground resistance fighters who rail against the regime) are persecuted by the secret police. Chile's Official 2008 Academy award entry. Winner Grand Prize and Best actor at the Havana Film Festival and the KNF Director's Prize Rotterdam Film Festival, 98 minutes

LIVERPOOL by Lisandro Alonso - (Argentina) – One of the New Argentine Cinema's most distinguished directors, Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad, Los Muertos), has a singular voice that speaks once again in Liverpool. A graceful ode to solitude and the existential need for meaning, this story follows a sailor named Farrel on a lonely journey to the southernmost region of Argentina. After traveling the world, Farrel asks the captain if he can leave the ship to see if his mother still lives in their old village. Alonso's wide shots of formidable mountain ranges connects Farrel's gloomy trek through the snow with the dark past that haunts him, creating an engrossing aesthetic that sets the director apart as a master of style and technique. Grand Jury Prize Gijon Int. Film Festival. 84 mins.

BIRDWATCHERS by Marco Bechis - (Brazil) -  In Mato Grosso do Sul, in the midwest of Brazil, the farmers who lead a wealthy and leisurely existence have huge fields, as well as hordes of tourists who come for bird watching. The Guarani-Kaiowá, the indigenous people who really own the land, are now confined to a nearby reservation and are paid to stand naked along the shores of the river in face paint to provide thrills for the visitors. Fed up with their officially-imposed financial and spiritual impoverishment, which has led to a wave of suicides, tribal leader Nadio and a local shaman organize a protest on former Guarani property that is now occupied by the deeply unsympathetic farmer Moreira and his cruel wife. As the two opposing worlds meet in an uneasy confrontation, a deep bond develops between the shaman's young apprentice, Osvaldo, and the farmer's bikini-clad daughter. Casting local non- professionals, director Marco Bechis draws out performances that effectively highlight the sharp clash between tyranny and a profoundly spiritual and ancient culture connected to nature. As the myths and realities of daily life are highlighted by striking visual contrasts of vast cultivated fields and lush forests and riverbeds, the two irreconcilable sides engage in metaphorical and actual war fueled by poverty and fear.  104 minutes

GIGANTE by Adrian Biniez -  (Uraguay) - Jara is a shy and lonely 35-year-old security guard at a supermarket on the outskirts of Montevideo. He works the night shift, monitoring the surveillance cameras of the entire building. One night Jara discovers Julia, a 25-year-old cleaning woman, through one of the cameras and is immediately attracted to her. Night after night, he watches her on the cameras while she works. Soon he starts following her after work: to the cinema, the beach and even to a date with another man. Jara's life becomes a series of routines and rituals around Julia, but eventually he finds himself at a crossroad and must decide whether to give up his obsession or confront it.  Winner Best First Feature, Grand Jury Prize and the Alfred Bauer Prize at the Berlin Int. Film Festival.  85 minutes

NORA'S WILL by Mariana Chenillo – (Mexico) Before dying, Nora schemes a plan to make José, her ex-husband, take care of her corpse. But she is missing something. For the only flaw in the plan –a mysterious photograph forgotten under the bed- will lead to an unexpected outcome reminding us that the biggest love stories are sometimes hidden in the smallest places. Winner Audience Award Miami Film Festival and Jury Prize and Best First Feature Los Angeles Latino Film Festival. 90 minutes

DOS PATRIAS (TWO HOMELANDS, CUBA AND THE NIGHT) by Christian Liffers – (Cuba) Framed by the beautiful poetry of the oppressed Cuban poet Reinaldo Arenas, this revealing documentary features memorable portraits of five gay men and one transsexual woman living in and around Havana. Their disparate stories and candid interviews dispel myths while demonstrating a range of experience, opinion and social status: A vibrant nineteen year old, Raudel attends illegal gay parties, since the government still cracks down on queer gatherings; Tomas is a former colleague of Arenas, still deeply in touch with the revolutionary spirit; A courageous and talented photographer, Eduardo explores the mythology of Cuban machismo through his work; Imperio is an HIV-positive drag artist performing in the illegal cabarets; Alexy is the son of a Communist official living under the radar on the Malecon; and Isabel is a transsexual woman whose triumphant spirit helps her survive in a hate-filled world.  It has been more than ten years since the success of films like Strawberry and Chocolate and Gay Cuba, so Two Homelands provides a fresh and important look at the present-day gay culture and community of an often misunderstood country that is still stuck in the past but also very dynamic and full of surprises.  84 minutes. 

WHO AM I? (THE FOUND CHILDREN OF ARGENTINA) by Estela Bravo – (Argentina) - What does it feel like to suddenly discover that your parents are not actually your parents, but part of a network of military criminals who murdered your mother and father? Or that your mother gave birth to you one minute and was killed the next? Or that as a young child you were kidnapped and given to friends of those who tortured and killed your parents? And then to find your true family? The children of Argentina's disappeared are now young adults struggling with such complex and traumatic discoveries. For 3 decades, the Plaza de Mayo Grandmothers have been searching for their 500 stolen grandchildren, the children of their own children who disappeared in Argentina's Dirty War (1976-83). To date, 88 of these missing children have been found and have recovered their true identity. WHO AM I? tells their story.  75 minutes.

March 8 & 9 @ 9:30 p.m.

THE MAN OF TWO HAVANAS by Vivien Weismen Lesnik – (Cuba) - Through the prism of a daughter we explore the past, the present, and the nature of social responsibility and personal sacrifice. The movie contains highly controversial top-secret audiotapes of a CIA trained Cuban exile Terrorist who is in the middle of a trial and incarcerated by Homeland Security. His trial puts the Bush administration's War on Terror on trial as well. The audiotape excerpts are from an NYT reporter who refuses to turn over these tapes. The never before heard audiotapes will be hotly debated in the media.  93 minutes.

THE INHERITORS by Eugenio Polgovsky – (Mexico) - The most highly praised and awarded Mexican documentary in many years, THE INHERITORS by Eugenio Polgovsky immerses us in the daily lives of children who, with their families, survive only by their unrelenting labor.  The film takes us into the agricultural fields, where children barely bigger than the buckets they carry, work long hours, in often hazardous conditions, picking tomatoes, peppers, or beans, for which they are paid by weight. Infants in baskets are left alone in the hot sun, or are breast-fed by mothers while they pick crops. THE INHERITORS also observes other labor routines, including the production of earthen bricks, cutting cane, gathering firewood, ox-plowing fields and planting by hand, and even more artistic endeavors such as carving wooden figures and weaving baskets to sell.  The indelible impression conveyed by THE INHERITORS, in which everyone-from the frailest elders to the smallest of toddlers-must work reveals how the cycle of poverty is passed on, from one generation to another.  Grand Prize Festival of New Latin Cinema.  90 minutes.

March 10 & 11 @ 9:30 p.m.

OBLIVION by Heddy Honigmann – (Peru) - The latest documentary from Heddy Honigmann (Forever, Metal and Melancholy, O Amor Natural) focuses on Peru's capital city of Lima, revealing its startling contrasts of wealth and poverty, and how many of its poorest citizens have survived decades of economic crisis, terrorism and government violence, denial of workers' rights, and political corruption. OBLIVION provides intimate and moving portraits of street musicians, singers, vendors, shoeshine boys, and the gymnasts (some mere children) and jugglers who perform at traffic stops. The film also visits with small business owners, from a leather-goods repairman and a presidential sash manufacturer to a frog-juice vendor, and contrasts the work and home environments of bartenders, waiters and waitresses employed at Lima's finest restaurants and hotels but who live in slums in the city's surrounding hillsides. Winner International Film Critics Prize and the Silver Dove Award  at the Leipzig Documentary Film Festival.   93 minutes.