These Are the Nominees for NALIP’s Latinx Film of the Year

Like many gay men in the 1980s, Miguel moved from Puerto Rico to New York City; he found a career in theater and a rewarding relationship. Yet, on his deathbed he grappled to reconcile his homosexuality with his Catholic upbringing. Now, decades after his death, his niece Cecilia locates Miguel’s estranged lover to understand the truth, and in the process opens up long-dormant family secrets.

A trio of Detroit delinquents who make a living out of breaking into homes think they’ve found the perfect mark: an Army vet who apparently has $300,000 in cash stashed in his house. To make things easier they find out he’s blind. Seeing the chance of finally getting enough money to make a life for themselves, Rocky, Alex, and Money plan to break into the blind man’s house at night and steal away his savings. In this terrifying cat-and-mouse thriller, Fede Alvarez basically takes up the question “What could possibly go wrong?” and with unrelenting force, delivers a pulse-pounding flick that never lets up once the Blind Man turns out to be not so helpless after all.

Led by searing performances by Édgar Ramírez as boxer Roberto Durán and Robert De Niro as his trainer Ray Arcel, Hands of Stone tells the rousing story of Panama’s famed welterweight fighter. Getting the Rocky treatment he so deserves, Durán’s story is brought to the screen by Jonathan Jakubowicz who has turned the boxer into the type of upstanding Latin American hero these sports stories so rarely celebrate. With knockout fighting scenes and delving into more personal territory (including his relationship with wife), the film traces the boxer’s life from when he was a young kid learning to punch all the way to his infamous fight against Sugar Ray Leonard (played by Usher).

Where teenaged Danny is from, lowrider culture is about more than just spectacular cars—it’s about ethnic heritage, community expression and family traditions. When an annual lowrider event forces him to choose between his traditional father (Demian Bichir) and his estranged criminal brother (Theo Rossi), Danny’s loyalties are severely tested.

La Granja takes Puerto Rico’s economic crisis as the backdrop for a series of interconnecting stories à la Amores Perros. In this twisted take on a fictionalized Puerto Rico, drug addiction and economic depression are the order of the day. One vignette follows a middle aged ex-boxer who trains his ambitious son for a youth boxing championship while he struggles with a cockfighting debt; another follows a midwife desperate for her own child; and the last dramatizes a young girl’s attempts to win the attention of her drug-addicted older sister. In the fruitless pursuit of hope, all three characters are eventually pushed to the limits of desperation.

A renowned Argentinean writer—a Nobel Prize winner no less!—gets an invitation to return to his small hometown to receive that year’s “Distinguished Citizen” award. The writer, who has lived abroad for the past few decades yet whose work is all about the small town life he left behind, hasn’t been home since he was a teenager. The homecoming becomes, in Duprat and Cohn’s dark dramedy, a clash of fiction and reality, of parochialism and cosmopolitanism, where it slowly dawns on the writer that everything back home is not as he left nor as he continued to imagine it.  Oscar Martínez won the Volpi Cup for Best Actor for his performance as the literary luminary stranded in a farcical world of his own making.

Those looking for a straight-up biopic of famed Chilean poet, Pablo Neruda, have come to the wrong film. In its place, Pablo Larraín has crafted a meta-poetic treatise on fiction and politics. Ostensibly, we’re being told the story (in first person voiceover narration) of how police officer Óscar Peluchonneau (Gael García Bernal) is trying to capture Neruda (Luis Gnecco), now a wanted man by the state. But with a dreamlike, fragmented shooting style that disorients you from line to line, Larraín is as interested in evoking Neruda’s artistry as he is in crafting a thrilling chase through late ’40s Chilean landscapes.

Tackling the ever timely issue of immigration, the younger Cuarón’s Desierto takes that one crossing-the-border plot line from Babel, adds in a ruthless minuteman (Watchmen‘s Jeffrey Dean Morgan), and for good measure, gives us Gael García Bernal in full-on survival mode. When a group of Mexicans try to cross over into the United States, they are forced to face a rifle-toting vigilante who’s intent on putting a bullet in them before they get any further along the border.

Shedding light on the child soldier experience, Alias Maria puts audiences smack in the middle of Colombia’s armed conflict. Young Maria (Karen Torres), a recruit for the guerrillas fighting in the middle of the jungle, is tasked with taking a newborn child to a nearby town. It’s a shrieking reminder of the perils of pregnancy during war—all the barely pubescent girl soldiers are freely used for sex but forbidden from carrying a child to term, a plot nugget that will surely clue you into what awaits Maria herself. Informed by countless interviews with women and children from the very regions the film depicts, and awash in the greens and browns of the conflict’s landscape, Rugeles’ film plays like a socially conscious arthouse flick about motherhood and war.

Starring Cecilia Roth, Migas de pan is a story about grappling with the past. Liliana (Roth) is preparing a suit alongside many other women who, between 1973 and 1985, were kidnapped and tortured for their dissident political views. Shuttling between the horrific ordeal she endured as a young woman fighting the regime in Uruguay and the hard choices she’s forced to make in the present as she seeks justice, Manane Rodriguez’s chilling flick sheds light on the resilience of women like Liliana and the burden they carry long after the country’s military rule was toppled.