Many Voices, Many Things to Say

Among the films screening in the first week of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival, which runs Friday through July 30 at the Egyptian Theater, is Chilean filmmaker Cristian Galaz’s tempestuous and lively three-episode “El Chacotero Sentimental: La Pelicula” (Saturday at 10 a.m., Sunday at 7 p.m.). A box-office smash in Chile last year, it marked the end of state censorship that began in the early ‘70s with the military dictatorship. The film is inspired by Chile’s most popular radio show, a call-in program whose host, Rumpy (Roberto Artiagoitia), serves as the bemused, seen-it-all narrator. The episodes are ostensibly based on calls made by listeners looking for advice or simply desiring to tell their stories.

The first episode is a funny and poignant tale of a young couple (Daniel Munoz and Lorene Prieto) whose love life is being ruined by the lack of privacy in a bleak housing project. The second is a taut, tragic tale of incest starring Ximena Rivas and Patricia Rivadeneira as sisters at odds with each other, whose father (Mateo Iribarren, who also wrote the entire film) has long taken one of them as his lover. “El Chacotero Sentimental” ends with a ribald tale in which the hot affair between a married woman (Tamara Acosta) and a neighbor student (Pablo Macaya) involves a surprising coincidence. Each segment is brisk and vital and attests to Galaz’s ability to make deft shifts in tone.

Alfonso Albacete and David Menkes’ “Sobrevivire” (I Will Survive) (Sunday at 9 p.m.) charts with compassion and perception a contemporary romance starring Emma Suarez and Juan Diego Botto, two of Spain’s most charismatic and versatile young stars. Suarez’s Marga is a widowed mother who has rebuilt her life with the help of her friend Rosa (Mirtha Ibarra), a warm and loving Cuban emigre. The 30ish Marga weighs the idea of a romance with a heretofore gay man (Botto) some 10 years her junior. With a mature realism, the filmmakers and their co-writer Lucia Etxeberria bring Marga to the point at which she must decide whether a love that is less than perfect and of uncertain duration is better than no love at all.

The Cuban offering, Gerardo Chijona’s “Un Paraiso Bajo las Estrellas” (A Paradise Under the Stars) (Monday at 7 p.m.) is a silly, old-fashioned, highly contrived backstage romantic comedy. A singer-turned-trucker, Candido (Enrique), was once enraged with jealousy over the exceedingly erotic dancing between his wife, Mabel (Daisy Granados), and her partner Armando (Santiago Alfonso) in a gaudy revue at Havana’s legendary Tropicana nightclub. Now, years later, Enrique’s daughter Sissy (Thais Valdes) wants to follow her mother’s footsteps, enraging Candido all over again. Sissy has to fend off advances from Armando, now the club’s choreographer, while commencing a romance with a young man, not knowing that he is married to the dancer whose key position at the club Sissy threatens to topple.

Maricarmen de Lara’s “En el Pais de no Pasa Nada” (In the Country Where Nothing Happens) (Monday at 9 p.m.) is a mordant skewering of wide-ranging corruption in contemporary Mexican society. The principal character in a large and entangled group is a suave, wealthy, crooked politician, played by distinguished-looking, silver-haired Fernando Lujan. He’s engaged in a lucrative scheme to flood the country’s poor with contaminated milk, but his philandering with a nightclub entertainer is caught on video and sent to his neglected wife (Julieta Egurrola).

Penelope Cruz, well on her way to international stardom, has arguably the best role of her career in Fernando Trueba’s inspired pitch-dark farce “La Nina de tus Ojos” (The Girl of Your Dreams) as the lovely and courageous star of a florid musical being produced at UFA in 1938 as a German-Spanish co-production.

Cruz and her doughty colleagues come face to face with Third Reich fascism in its swift ascendance--and increasingly blatant anti-Semitism. This outrageous yet caustic comedy (screened at the American Cinematheque in February), with its world on the verge of war, has touches of Georges Feydeau in its comic confusions and Billy Wilder in its satire.

The festival will be highlighted with a retrospective of the films of Maria Felix, who will be honored at the festival banquet July 29 for her lifetime contributions to the Mexican cinema. (323) 469-9066.

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Tonight at 7:30 at the Egyptian, American Cinematheque’s “Alternative Screen” series presents Daniel Yoon’s jaunty and sweet-natured semi-autobiographical “Post Concussion.” Several years ago, Yoon was a workaholic management consultant, a dedicated corporate down-sizer. Then he received a serious head injury when he was struck by a car in Berkeley. During his long recovery, he taught himself filmmaking, which resulted in this humorous expression of how he learned to appreciate life and people.

Good-looking and witty, Yoon, as his alter-ego Matthew Kang, is a natural comedian with an engaging personality. There’s not much forward momentum in this minimalist work, but its stop-and-smell-the-roses sentiment comes across with a light touch. Big, burly Destry Miller is funny in four roles; he’s also the film’s co-producer, gaffer and sound mixer. Jennifer Welch is Matthew’s amusingly forthright downstairs neighbor, an East German-born grad student in physics who, in movie tradition, is very pretty when she takes off her glasses. Playing with “Post Concussion” is Mark Caballero and Seamus Walsh’s “Graveyard Jamboree,” a puppet-monster cartoon short with a period animation look--and made with painstaking old methods--keyed to the ‘30s pop song that inspired it, “Mysterious Mose.” (323) 466-FILM.