10 Must-See Movies at San Francisco Latino Film Festival

Ripped from the headlines, Love Cecy takes audiences back to the cholo, free-style culture of 1990s California as it retells the story of 15 year old Cecilia Rios. The film follows Rios’ promising beginnings- striving to become a lawyer while keeping her cholo boyfriend off the streets- to its tragic end on March 14, 1994, when her brutal murder was chronicled by newspapers across the country.

This vibrant portrait of six troubled teenagers showcases the talents of a young charismatic cast as it explores the ongoing challenges of economic disparities, gentrification, displacement, and evictions faced through the lens of Latino and Afro-Latino American youth in South Houston. Matías is a bright teenager whose family struggles with harsh financial troubles. When he discovers “Los Ricos,” a wealthy family, are out of town, Matías breaks into their mansion where he and his friends spend an afternoon basking in the good life. The party is soon disrupted when a trouble-making relative shows up uninvited. Loyalties are pushed to the breaking point as Matías’s desire for power in the house rises.

Considered by many as the first musician to bring salsa music to an international audience, Panamanian singer, songwriter, and actor Ruben Blades is highlighted in a documentary that spans his 50-year career and gives audiences an in-depth look at his musical and political aspirations. (Does he really want to run for president of Panama?). The doc attempts to help Blades decide what the term legacy actually means. Blades has won 17 Grammys, earned a law degree from Harvard University, and has starred in such films as the 1988 comedy drama The Milagro Beanfield War, 2000’s drama All the Pretty Horses, and 2016’s biopic Hands of Stone. He currently stars on AMC’s Fear the Walking Dead.

Dealing with grief can be a painful and solitary experience. That’s definitely the case for Claudia. She’s just lost her dear cousin and rather than face her absence, the young nurse walls herself off from the world. That is, until she runs into an old friend who’s in need of help. With a muted color palette and an equally restrained central performance El sonido de las cosas is a probing character study of what it means to lose those we are closest to.

Social worker Abel and auto mechanic Diego have waited for too long to fall in love with the right partner; not even Diego’s undocumented status can stop a relationship that was meant to be. But when word reaches Diego that his mother is dying, Abel resolves to be his partner in the truest sense of the word, accompanying him back to Mexico even though Diego will not be guaranteed re-entry to the country. What starts as a tender love story turns into a harrowing tale as both try to figure a way to cross back.

In Havana, Lucas has a psychedelic trip to back to the 80s after snorting his mother’s ashes while on a bender. Lucas becomes his mother somehow. He believes that being trapped inside his mother’s body he must find a way to be ‘born again’ and that means having to find and ‘meet’ his father. It’s a boundary pushing road trip film full of laughs, sex, Cuban music, and trippy absurdity. Lucas just wants to figure out who he really is.

In 1967, Chicano leader King Tiger (born Reies Lopez Tijerina) along with armed men took over the court of Tierra Amarilla, New Mexico by force. The outcome of such bold action was the largest manhunt in recent US history. Tijerina managed to survive prison, a psychiatric hospital, and a several assassination attempts. The Chicano movement weakened, Tijerina faded away. People speak of him as a saint, an enlightened man, a man that used violence for a just cause. King Tiger is alive and he wants to tell his story.

Guided by ayahuasca chants, Green River. The Time of the Yakurunas is a poetic journey into the depths of the Amazon. The film explores the perception of time in three small villages intertwined by the flowing waters of the Amazon river, immersing the viewer in a landscape inhabited by shamans and archetypical societies. This hybrid narrative depicts the bodies of native elders to evoke the ghosts of rubber colonialism at the end of 19th century, the memory of ancient indigenous cultures still alive, but in danger of disappearing as a consequence of global capitalism.

Clara and Alejandro are moving to a new home, but soon he goes on a work trip and she stays alone, surrounded by closed boxes. This mess compels her to live new experiences that will lead her to question the closed and hermetic world where she lives.

Diverse cuisine is rarely counted among the cultural phenomena for which Cuba is celebrated; popular notions of Cuba as a placed defined by deprivation doesn’t help. A richly comprehensive remedy for this misperception, Cuban Food Stories visits every province in the country to sample a culinary legacy grounded in so much more than rice and beans.