Guillermo del Toro’s ‘Shape of Water’ + Must-See Latino Movies Head to Los Angeles for AFI Fest

In 1963, Elisa (Sally Hawkins) works as a janitor at a US government laboratory. One night, a strange, amphibious creature (Guillermo del Toro regular Doug Jones) is wrangled into the facility. Elisa is more fascinated than frightened. What scares her more is the threat posed by the federal agent in charge (Michael Shannon). Cruel and self-serving, he seems convinced the surest way to handle the mysterious creature is to kill it. With the help of her neighbor Giles (Richard Jenkins), her co-worker Zelda (Octavia Spencer), and a sympathetic scientist (Michael Stuhlbarg), Elisa hatches a plan to save the creature’s life, at the risk of her own. Strange marvels abound in The Shape of Water. Marshalling these remarkable performances together with stunning production design, fluid camerawork, and Alexandre Desplat’s gorgeous score, del Toro delivers unforgettable film poetry.

A chilling examination of maternal instincts taken to extremes, the latest from Mexican writer-director Michel Franco (After Lucía) stars Spanish actress Emma Suárez as a woman whose fierce passion and cunning seem drawn equally from Greek tragedy and film noir. Seventeen years old and seven months pregnant, Valeria (Ana Valeria Becerril) appears beatific and content, living with her sister, Clara (Joanna Larequi), in a Puerto Vallarta bungalow and making plans for the future with her boyfriend, Mateo (Enrique Arrizon). Valeria had no plans to inform her estranged mother of her pregnancy, but after a call from Clara, April (Suárez) swoops in to offer abundant support. April is charming, youthful, energetic, and resourceful: an ideal grandmother. Once Valeria’s child is born, however, April’s take-charge attitude assumes terrifying hues.

Marina (Daniela Vega), the transgender heroine of A Fantastic Woman, is beautiful, enigmatic, and plunged into a precarious situation after her boyfriend dies unexpectedly in her company. Fifty-seven-year-old divorcé Orlando (Francisco Reyes) wakes in the middle of the night, suffers an aneurism, and falls down some stairs, sustaining injuries that will come to haunt Marina after she takes him to the hospital and attempts to slip away before authorities and family members begin prying. Marina knows she’s regarded with suspicion for her youth, class, and, above all, gender status. She expects to gain little from Orlando’s demise, but the viciousness of Orlando’s son, the cold-heartedness of Orlando’s ex-wife, and the intrusiveness of a detective from the Sexual Offenses Investigation Unit force Marina to not only clear her name, but also to demand the very thing no one seems willing to give her: respect.

Bathed in the blue hues of full moonlit nights, this Brazilian werewolf horror film follows Clara, a nurse from the outskirts of São Paulo who takes a job as a nanny for a well-to-do pregnant young woman. What starts as a regular caretaker gig soon takes a turn for the weird when the woman’s odd cravings for red meat and late-night sleepwalking strolls reveal that there may be something unnatural about her pregnancy. Eerie and shot with a lurid formalism that makes it all the scarier (São Paulo’s nights have looked more frightening), Good Manners delivers on its chills and thrills.

In Júlia Murat’s Pendular a sculptor and a dancer shack up in an expansive warehouse that will double as their studio. To keep things civil, they divide it equally, using tape to delineate their respective areas. But they soon find out that living in such close quarters while trying to follow their artistic goals is harder than they’d anticipated. Mixing contemporary dance sequences, steamy sex scenes, and bitter quarrels between the couple at hand, Murat’s third feature is a seductive look at the creative process.

The first collaboration between film and sound artist Bonnetta and filmmaker/anthropologist Sniadecki is a lyrical and highly topical film in which the Sonoran Desert, among the deadliest routes taken by those crossing from Mexico to the United States, is depicted a place of dramatic beauty and merciless danger. Haunting 16mm images of the unforgiving landscape and the human traces within it are supplemented with an intricate soundtrack of interwoven sounds and oral testimonies. Urgent yet never didactic, El mar la mar allows this symbolically fraught terrain to take shape in vivid sensory detail, and in so doing, suggests new possibilities for the political documentary.

Set right before a punk band is set to go on stage, its lead singer Anita (Sophia Dueñas) tries to break off her toxic relationship with the band’s drummer only to see their breakup take an explosive (literally!) turn.

Julio César Cu Cámara is the chief diver in the Mexico City sewer system. His job is to repair pumps and dislodge garbage that flows into the gutters to maintain the circulation of sewage waters.

Creatively visualized through 3D printing, two elderly Latinos embark on a resonating he said/she said account of the events that led them to live separately after more than 50 quirky and stressful years together.

Directed by Melissa Perez, Still Devout follows vacillating 23-year-old Ceci, who reluctantly embarks on a journey to grant her mother’s wish—to find healing for Ceci’s brother suffering with severe mental illness. After Ceci’s brother has a severe psychotic episode, Ceci is hoping to gain peace in the family. A trip driven by faith, love and desperation complicates as the family’s values and identities clash.

The artist Guadalupe Rosales wanted to resist the erasure of history, so she created a monumental archive of Los Angeles youth culture called Veteranas and Rucas on instagram. But when anti-gentrification activists in her Los Angeles neighborhood Boyle Heights begin protesting art galleries, Rosales gets caught in the middle of a heated conflict.