{"id":502411,"date":"2026-10-20T17:14:12","date_gmt":"2026-10-20T17:14:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/502411\/"},"modified":"2026-10-20T17:14:12","modified_gmt":"2026-10-20T17:14:12","slug":"screen-grabs-sf-latino-film-fest-finds-a-happy-place-in-heavy-times","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/502411\/","title":{"rendered":"Screen Grabs: SF Latino Film Fest finds a happy place in heavy times"},"content":{"rendered":"

What a moment for\u00a0SF Latino Film Festival<\/a>\u00a0(Thu\/22-November 1)to return, as ICE raids Central Valley agricultural fields<\/a>\u2014apparently our POTUS does not eat produce, though at times he could be classified as a vegetable\u2014and draws guns on US citizens in downtown SF<\/a>. Cine+Mas\u2019 18th edition of its annual showcase also opens with a film celebrating multiculturalism, public education, and public television\u2026 three\u00a0more\u00a0things that are in a right-wing political chokehold at present.<\/p>\n

That unfortunate relevancy aside, Eddie Bustamente\u2019s\u00a0Street Smart: Lessons from a TV Icon\u00a0is its own happy place, a paean to the career and influence of four-decade\u00a0Sesame Street\u00a0performer Sonia Manzano. The Bronx-raised child of Puerto Rican emigres, she did not get much encouragement at home or elsewhere once she got interested in acting. Still, she kept being in the right place at the right time, her first big break coming when as a college student she was cast in the original Carnegie Mellon production of\u00a0Godspell\u2014then transferred with it to a very long-running Off-Broadway run.\u00a0<\/p>\n

During that stint she tried out for the Muppets-powered PBS show that would revolutionize children\u2019s television. Joining the (human) cast during its third season, she\u2019d make a huge impression on viewers as Sesame Street resident Maria, providing a cool, accessible Latina role model. She was so identified with the character, many believed Manzano was really married to her TV beau Luis, played by Emilio Delgado. <\/p>\n

Fewer were aware of the 15 Emmys she won for the show were as a contributing writer. Her other accomplishments include creating the ongoing, semi-autobiographical kids\u2019 animated series\u00a0Alma\u2019s Family, about a six-year-old girl\u2026 whose Puerto Rican family lives in the Bronx. With input from various colleagues and fans, as well as myriad archival clips, original animation sequences and some dramatized sequences,\u00a0Street Smart\u00a0gives off what a festival opener is generally meant to: good vibes.<\/p>\n

Also mixing animation and other elements in a nonfiction package is Sundance prizewinner\u00a0TheyDream, William D. Caballero\u2019s imaginative portrait of his own frequently beleaguered Puerto Rican family. Other documentary features in Latino Fest this year include ones about shamanic eco-activism in Brazil (Maxita), youthful Guatemalan art-as-protest (Comparsa), a transgender journey from Mexico to California then back again (Libertad), a Ecuadoran woman\u2019s work helping north-bound migrants (Carmela and the Walkers), and a starry tribute to Mexican-American musicmaking (Bird of Four Hundred Voices).<\/p>\n

Among narrative features is the official closing night selection\u00a0Cara Pura, Bruno Irizarry\u2019s seriocomedy about a man (Jencarlos Canela) struggling to save his family\u2019s historied hotel after Hurricane Maria\u2019s 2017 devastation. Also from Puerto Rico is Michelle Malley Campos\u2019\u00a0Foreigner, which finds a young teacher\u2019s forced exile to Taiwan after a scandal. Alberto Utrera\u2019s Spanish\u00a0Ownerships\u00a0is a black comedy in which a younger couple desperate for more space get a great deal on a huge flat\u2014but they can only occupy it when the exasperating current tenant dies.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Comedy in a lighter key is offered by Clara Martinez-Lazaro Almeda\u2019s\u00a0Strawberry Lips, wherein a reunion between childhood friends takes some highly unexpected turns. Henrique Dantas\u2019\u00a0Garden of Silences\u00a0finds an Italy-raised oncologist returning to his native Brazil, where his parents suffered greatly under the dictatorship. In a similar vein, Paula de Luque\u2019s B&W\u00a0Escritor\u00a0has a journalist probing a particularly heinous crime during the mid-1950s era of military coup: A roundup and slaughter of men who it turns out weren\u2019t even connected to the political opposition.\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of the most intriguing fiction features is Argentine writer-director Karla Badillo\u2019s debut\u00a0Oca, a religious (or perhaps anti-religious) allegory whose disparate characters are all heading for one reason or another down dusty rural roads to San Vicente, hoping to implore the newly-appointed archbishop. Among them is Rafaela (Natalia Solian), a young nun whose convent is so neglected, it no longer has a roof. There\u2019s also a group of argumentative villagers, a rich lady with chauffeur, an AWOL pilot, and his furious superior. Not everything works, but\u00a0Oca\u00a0is a fresh and ambitious mix of barbed social commentary, gentle humor and magical realism.\u00a0<\/p>\n

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SF Latino Fest also features several shorts programs and some free screenings (including an outdoor one of the 2023 U.S. sci-fi fantasy\u00a0Blue Beetle\u00a0on Sat\/24). The festival runs Thursday\/22-Nov. 1 at various San Francisco locations, with some selections also available On Demand. For full schedule, program and ticket info, go here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Those who prefer their film festivals to be all \u201cvirtual\u201d are in luck, as this week also brings the 13th edition of the SF-based\u00a0Legacy Film Festival on Aging. Running this Fri\/23 through November 22, it offers a full month of streaming titles\u2014shorts, features, documentaries, narratives\u2014dealing in one way or another with the triumphs and trials of seniority. There are movies about artists and activists, the fight against ageist beauty standards, intergenerational bonds, pressing health issues, and more. The 2006\u00a0Been Rich All My Life, a full-length portrait of five Harlem Renaissance chorines still tap-dancing into their antiquity, will be accessible for free. For full info, go here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

This week is particularly heavy on promising new releases that were not available for preview by deadline. They include the heavily awards-favored Spanish gay epic\u00a0La Bola Negra, Taika Waititi\u2019s sci-fi Kazuo Ishiguro adaptation\u00a0Klara and the Sun, South Korean director Lee Chang-dong\u2019s (Poetry, Burning) multiple Venice prize-winner\u00a0Possible Love, Sacha Baron Cohen\u2019s cinge-y comeback vehicle\u00a0Ali G: Who Iz I?, acclaimed stop-motion animation fantasy\u00a0Wildwood, and DC Comics-drawn horror\u00a0Clayface. (The latter would not excite much anticipation if it weren\u2019t directed by Mike Watkins, whose first feature\u00a0Eden Lake\u00a0was among the more harrowing thrillers of the last twenty years.)<\/p>\n

A couple films we\u00a0have\u00a0seen are getting special screening events over the next few days, with filmmakers in person.\u00a0Jack Macinnes and Itab Azzam\u2019s documentary\u00a0One in a Million, which won the Audience Award at Sundance this year, is a powerful film about immigration, its causes, and its pitfalls. Israa is just a little girl when her family gets bombed out of Syria by civil war. They successively land in Turkey, then Greece, then Germany, where westernization creates new problems between generations. Shot over a decade\u2019s course, it\u2019s a complex, fascinatingly intimate portrait of the political becoming very personal indeed. Macinnes and Israa will hold post-screening Q&A\u2019s at the Elmwood, Roxie (both Sat\/24), Rafael Film Center, and UNAFF in Palo Alto (both Sun\/25).\u00a0<\/p>\n

On Thu\/22 writer-director Zach Clark will visit the Bay Area to present his 2023\u00a0The Becomers, a whimsically wayward spin on\u00a0Invasion of the Body Snatchers\u00a0in which shape-shifting space aliens try humanity on for size\u2014and find our species a poor fit. Sparks\u2019 Russell Mael is this absurdist, exquisite-corpse-like tale\u2019s voiceover narrator. Clark will be in discussion with critic AS Hamrah at Oakland\u2019s Shapeshifters Cinema, info here<\/a>.<\/p>\n

Some new releases:<\/p>\n

Wicker<\/p>\n

There have been quite a number of movies in recent years that sought to reinvent fairy tales (or sometimes just the familiar conventions of fairy tales) in grown-up modern terms. But few have been as satisfying as this sophomore feature from writer-directors Alex Huston Fischer and Eleanor Wilson, adapting a short story by Ursula Wills. Olivia Colman plays resident Fisherwoman to a vaguely medieval village in vaguely mittle-Europa, where everyone else is also known solely by their societal role. She\u2019s accustomed to slurs,\u00a0\u00a0as an unlovely spinster with an, er, professional odor.\u00a0<\/p>\n

But one day something stirs in her, and she commissions the surprised Basket Weaver (Peter Dinklage, seldom better) to \u201cmake me a husband.\u201d Even more surprisingly, he delivers. The Wicker Man (Alexander Skarsgard) shortly arriving at her doorstep may not be flesh and blood, but he is handy, devoted, and apparently stellar in the sack. So much so that soon the local \u201cwives are all aflutter,\u201d plainly jealous of a spouse so unlike their boorish own. Chief among this resentful lot is the Tailor\u2019s Wife (Elizabeth Debicki), just the sort of princessy Karen to view someone else\u2019s happiness as a sin she must punish.<\/p>\n

A multinational production shot in Hungary,\u00a0Wicker\u00a0makes tart points of a tacitly feminist and\/or political nature without belaboring them in the least. It is funny sans cruelty, surprisingly poignant when things turn more serious, and capable of pulling off a complicatedly kinda-sorta happy ending that feels just right. Opening in theaters nationwide Fri\/23, it is one of the year\u2019s most winning unexpected pleasures.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Fjord\u00a0<\/p>\n

The biggest long-term star of the Romanian New Wave that started about 20 years ago, writer-director Cristian Mungiu makes the inevitable move to multinational, largely English-language cinema with this latest effort. The Gheorghius are a devout Christian family consisting of father Mihai (Sebastian Stan), mother Lisbet (Renate Reinsve), teens Elia (Vanessa Ceban) and Emmanuel (Jonathan Ciprian Breazu), plus two grade-school-aged children and a baby who\u2019s still breast-feeding. At the start they\u2019ve just moved from Bucharest (where the couple met) to Lisbet\u2019s hometown, a picturesque, minuscule Norwegian hamlet surrounded by fjords and mountains.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Initially things go very well: The community is welcoming, the parents get good jobs, the family is comfortable in their new church. The rather sheltered teens acquire an exciting new friend in next-door-neighbor Noora (Henrikke Lund-Olsen), mildly-rebellious only child to headmaster Mats (Markus Tonseth) and nonpracticing lawyer Mia (Lisa Carlehed). But benignly tolerated differences in culture, language (English is everyone\u2019s common ground), and religious observance or non-observance suddenly become a chasm when school staff notice bruises on Elia\u2019s body.\u00a0<\/p>\n

She got them from a rough-housing argument with her brother that neither party viewed as any big deal. But it is misunderstood that this is an indicator of parental abuse, and to the entire family\u2019s bewilderment, all the children are abruptly removed to foster care while an \u201cinvestigation\u201d takes place that seems very much biased against the Gheorghius. As bureaucracy drags that separation on, it becomes something of an international incident, with fed-up Mihai gaining public support from media and religious sources back home in Romania.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Mungiu is a master storyteller whose methodical pacing over 146 minutes never grows slack. But compelling as it is,\u00a0Fjord\u2014which won the Palme d\u2019Or at Cannes, as did his devastating 2007 abortion drama\u00a04 Months, 3 Weeks and 2 Days\u2014arguably takes on more ideas than it can fully develop. Disbelief must be suspended that authorities would rush to remove children from a home (against their will, even) on such flimsy evidence, then seemingly not bother to ask them to clarify what happened re: Elia\u2019s bruising. <\/p>\n

Are Norwegian Child Protective Services really this reckless in their advocacy? Despite the director\u2019s muted, astute style, at times the film verges on a reactionary indictment of \u201cprogressive\u201d secular society, as the family\u2019s Christian faith gets treated as cultish, and their mild child disciplining deliberately misrepresented as monstrous.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The somewhat messy end result can be a little frustrating\u2014Thomas Vinterberg\u2019s 2012 Danish\u00a0The Hunt\u00a0remains a more sharply focused dramatization of a similar false-accusation scenario\u2014but it is no less absorbing for that. Fjord\u00a0opens in Bay Area theaters including the Kabuki, Alamo New Mission, Elmwood and Smith Rafael on Fri\/23.\u00a0<\/p>\n

A Talent for Murder<\/p>\n

Though she died over three decades ago, Patricia Highsmith is as popular as ever, her books frequently adapted for the screen. This latest from director Anton Corbijn (Control), however, is from a stage play by Joanna Murray-Smith that utilizes the late scribe as a character in its own original fiction.<\/p>\n

In 1995, a US publisher dispatches young assistant Edward (Alden Ehrenreich) to Switzerland, where the misanthropic American-expat authoress is living a reclusive existence. He\u2019s charged with getting her to sign a new contract and, hopefully, pen a new best-seller starring her signature antihero, the insinuating sociopath Tom Ripley.<\/p>\n

Highsmith (Helen Mirren) abhors visitors, particularly from her native land and\/or publishing companies. After ordering him to leave a dozen times, however, she allows Edward to stay, rather like a cat might linger in play with a terrified mouse. However, this guest might have his\u00a0own\u00a0scheming side, particularly in regard to his Ripley-like interactions with an heiress (Olivia Cooke) he met on his way here.<\/p>\n

Mirren, who played another cantankerous real-life literary figure in 1999\u2019s\u00a0The Passion of Ayn Rand, is in glint-eyed good form here. But the young leads lacks the glamorous\u00a0frisson\u00a0required, while Corbijn often seems more interested in the tony locations utilized than the script\u2019s attempted intricacies of plot or psychology. In the end, this is a cozier \u201cmystery\u201d than Highsmith ever wrote, a bit predictably pat in its twists as well as the way in which stories-within-the-story begin to blur. It\u2019s okay, but the kind of enterprise that overestimates its own cleverness. A Talent for Murder\u00a0opens in theaters nationwide Fri\/23.\u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"What a moment for\u00a0SF Latino Film Festival\u00a0(Thu\/22-November 1)to return, as ICE raids Central Valley agricultural fields\u2014apparently our POTUS…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":502412,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30],"tags":[101,103,102,104,106,105],"class_list":["post-502411","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco","tag-san-francisco-headlines","tag-san-francisco-news","tag-sf","tag-sf-headlines","tag-sf-news"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502411","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=502411"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/502411\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/502412"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=502411"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=502411"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/us-ca\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=502411"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}