CHRIS SEARLE recommends a work of love and deep admiration for a great musician
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Cinelatino Festival
New films from Latin America pack a sharp political punch
AUTHENTIC: La Chica Nueva (The New Girl)
KENNY MacASKILL relishes a fictionalised account of the life and death of the principled Irish anti-colonialist, executed for betraying his English imperial masters
FIONA O’CONNOR admires an ambitious first novel that loosens South Africa’s rainbow collective to examine the racial tensions within
Aussie mining corporation murder, Liverpudlian ex-cop amnesia, a naive vigilante tries to reset capitalism, and the riddle of the dead psychoanalyst
SYLVIA HIKINS is persuaded by an entertaining play that the true miracle of Lourdes would be for attitudes toward disability to change
JAMIE BRITTON recommends this fine analysis of the architectural, ecological and infrastructural destruction of the Gaza Strip
LA CHICA NUEVA (The New Girl) by Argentinian film-maker Micaela Gonzalo is a splendid debut film, which tells the story of the homeless and broke Jimena who goes to meet her half-brother in Rio Grande.
Seeking to change her life in the midst of a financial crisis, the young Jimena finds a job in a factory there and, with it, a community to belong to.
The director intermingles the personal transformation of the young protagonist with a critique of working life in a film tackling the injustices of an uncaring capitalism. As it does so, it invokes an authentic socialist alternative in an innovative and vigorous way.
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