Latin American Cinema
OVID offers as extensive a collection of recent feature films from Latin America as you’ll find anywhere.
Some are by well-known directors on the international stage, such as three by Pablo Larrain (including his first hit, TONY MANERO), Mexico’s Carlos Reygadas (OUR TIME), and also three by Raul Ruiz (including his last film, THE WANDERING SOAP OPERA).
But many more are by exciting, younger filmmakers such as Chile’s Dominga Sotomayor, the first woman to win Best Director at the Locarno Film Festival with 2018’s TOO LATE TO DIE YOUNG.
Exploring this collection will be well-worth your while if you’re interested in films, well-known or perhaps unknown to you, from some of the most exciting developing film cultures to be found anywhere.
Also, note that OVID has an even more extensive collection of classic and contemporary documentaries from Latin America, which you will find here!
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Summer White
Directed by Rodrigo Ruiz Patterson • Drama • With Adrián Ross, Sophie Alexander-Katz • 2020 • 85 minutes
13-year-old Rodrigo is a solitary teenager who finds solace in his intimate relationship with his mother, Valeria. She is his best friend, his protector, and his entire world. When her new bo...
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Casa Grande
Directed by Fellipe Barbosa • Drama • With Marcello Novaes, Suzana Pires, Thales Cavalcanti • 2014 • 115 minutes
Jean Cavalcanti attends a well reguarded private boys' school. He lives a carefree life of moderate privilege in a gated, custom built house in an affluent neighborhood in suburban Ri...
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Embrace of the Serpent
Directed by Ciro Guerra • Drama • With Nilbio Torres, Antonio Bolívar, Jan Bijvoet • 2015 • 125 minutes
At once blistering and poetic, the ravages of colonialism cast a dark shadow over the South American landscape in EMBRACE OF THE SERPENT, the third feature by Ciro Guerra. Filmed in stunning b...
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This is Cristina
Movie
Directed by Gonzalo Maza • Drama • With Mariana Derderián, Paloma Salas • 2018 • 82 minutes
Frances Ha is called Cristina in this Chilean generational comedy produced by Salma Hayek and directed by Gonzalo Maza, screenwriter of A Fantastic Woman and Gloria. Maza is renowned as one of the great s...
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The Maid
Directed by Sebastián Silva • Drama • With Catalina Saavedr, Claudia Celedón • 2009 • 95 minutes
After 23 years working as a devoted maid in an upper class Chilean household, embittered and ailing Raquel (Sundance Film Festival and Gotham Award winner Catalina Saavedra) can no longer care for th...
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My Friend from the Park
Directed by Ana Katz • Drama • With Julieta Zylberberg, Maricel Álvarez, Ana Katz
• 2015 • 84 minutesLiz is struggling to adjust to her new life as a mother. With her husband in a different country for work, Liz has left her job to stay at home and care for their baby, Nicanor. Making things w...
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Too Late to Die Young
Directed by Dominga Sotomayor • Drama • With Demian Hernández, Antar Machado, Magdalena Tótoro • 2019 • 110 minutes
Chile 1990, at the end of Pinochet's dictatorship, a group of adolescents living in a commune, attempt to make sense of their own burgeoning desires and tangled relationships while...
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Violeta Went to Heaven
Directed by Andrés Wood • Drama • With Francisca Gavilán, Cristian Quevedo, Thomas Durand , Roberto Farías, Gabriela Aguilera, Juan Quezada, Marcial Tagle • 2013 • 110 minutes
Violeta Went to Heaven tells the story of famed Chilean singer and folklorist Violeta Parra, tracing her evolution f...
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339 Amín Abel Hasbun. Memory of a Crime
Directed by Etzel Báez • Drama • With Margaux Da Silva, Pericles Mejía, Guillermo Liriano, Pablo David Quinteros, Ernesto Báez, Héctor Then, Ico Abreu, Mario Núñez • 2014 • 97 minutes
Based on a real story, 339 Amín Abel Hasbun is an intriguing account of the murder of Amín Abel Hasbun, a brilli...
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The Club
Directed by Pablo Larrain • Drama • With Alfredo Castro, Marcelo Alonso, Antonia Zegers • 2015 • 97 minutes
In a secluded house in a small seaside town live four unrelated men and the woman who tends to the house and their needs. All former priests, they have been sent to this quiet exile to pur...
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Pendular
Directed by Julia Murat • Drama • With Raquel Karro; Rodrigo Bolzan • 2017 • 105 minutes
A young couple settles down in a large abandoned industrial warehouse. An orange strip, glued to the floor, partitions the area in two equal portions: to the right, his sculpture atelier; to the left, her da...
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Tú y Yo
Directed by Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada • Drama • With Paula Lebrón, Francisca Pérez De Sosa • 2014 • 86 minutes
The Mrs., an elderly widow, and Aridia, a young maid, live together in a house filled with orchids in the center of Santo Domingo. Aridia cleans, the Mrs. gardens, and when work ...
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Yo
Directed by Matias Meyer • Drama • With Raúl Silva, Elizabeth Mendoza • 2015 • 80 minutes
Yo is a strong young man, but with limited mental skills. He says he is fifteen years old, although he seems to be older. He lives and works in his mother's restaurant by a busy freeway. Yo loves his mother...
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Mar
Directed by Dominga Sotomayor • Drama • With Nicolás Ibieta, Vanina Montes, Lisandro Rodríguez • 2014 • 58 minutes
Martín goes on vacation with his girlfriend to Villa Gesell, an Argentinian beach. Everything seems normal and stable, until his mother’s arrival. Lightning strikes, and soon they n...
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El Incendio
Directed by Juan Schitman • Drama • With Pilar Gamboa, Juan Barberini • 2015 • 95 minutes
On the way to closing the contract on their first home, Lucía and Marcelo withdraw a hundred thousand dollars in cash from their bank. The seller can’t make it to the signing and it gets postponed to the ne...
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Thursday Till Sunday
Directed by Dominga Sotomayor • Drama • With Santi Ahumada, Francisco Pérez-Bannen, Paola Giannini • 2012 • 98 minutes
It all begins on a Thursday when Lucía (9) and Manuel (5) go on vacation with their parents to the north of Chile. It all ends on a Sunday. It’s the children’s distant and fragm...
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Veronico Cruz
Directed by Miguel Pereira • Drama • With Leopoldo Aban, Juan José Camero, Guillermo Delgado • 1987 • 96 minutes
Miguel Pereira’s first feature is a profound and moving tale of a young shepherd boy growing up in a remote village in the Argentinian mountains. The film traces his life via his frie...
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Our Time
Directed by Carlos Reygadas • Drama • With Carlos Reygadas, Natalia López, Phil Burgers • 2018 • 87 minutes
A family lives in the Mexican countryside raising fighting bulls. Esther is in charge of running the ranch, while her husband Juan, a world-renowned poet, raises and selects the beasts. Al...
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Bluebeard (Kékszakállú)
Directed by Gastón Solnicki • Drama • With Laila Maltz, Lara Tarlowski,
Katia Szechtman • 2016 • 72 minutesHailed as "an eerie high-modernist fable... mightily minimalist, and drop-dead gorgeous" (Film Comment), Kékszakállú is a beguiling portrait of several young women at the threshold of adu...
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Three Summers
Directed by Sandra Kogut • Drama • With Regina Casé, Rogério Fróes, Otavio Müller • 2019 • 94 minutes
Over a trio of summers, a caretaker for luxury condominiums (Regina Casé) relies on her resourcefulness and her eye for opportunity to take advantage of whatever comes her way, in Sandra Kogut’s...
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Cinema of Tears
Directed by Nelson Pereira Dos Santos • Documentary • With Raul Cortez, André Barros, Christiane Torloni, Patrick Tannus, Cosme Alves Neto • 1995 • 95 minutes
Personal view of the Latin American cinema by Brazilian director Nelson Pereira dos Santos, based on an adaptation of a novel by Silvia O...
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Cinema Novo
Directed by Eryk Rocha • Documentary • 2016 • 90 minutes
CINEMA NOVO is a film essay that poetically investigates the eponimous Brazilian film movement, the most prominent in Latin America in the past century, through the analysis of its main auteurs: Nelson Pereira do Santos, Glauber Rocha, Leo...
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Patricio Guzmán
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Patricio Guzmán was born in 1941 in Santiago, Chile. As an adolescent in the late 1950's he became drawn to documentary filmmaking when he had the opportunity to see some of the films of Chris Marker, Frederic Rossif and Louis Malle. He studied filmmaking at the Film Institute at the Catholic Uni...
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Post Mortem
Directed by Pablo Larrain • Drama • With Marcelo Alonso, Jaime Vadell, Antonia Zegers, Amparo Noguera, Alfredo Castro
• 2012 • 98 minutesThe second part of director Pablo Larrain's celebrated trilogy about Chile during the dictatorial reign of Augusto Pinochet, Post Mortem is a "grim, intense...