4 Films Blurring Truth & Fiction at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival

It's quite perfect that our inaugural newsletter makes its first stop in glitzy L.A., the seat of the entertainment industry. Even more so, with our lens pointed at the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival's 25th edition, which brought Latinos of all stripes to the famed Chinese Theater in Hollywood last week.

While the census tells us that Los Angeles County is majority Latino, Hollywood still rarely reflects that reality onscreen or behind the camera. That's why we're spotlighting the indie movies in which, despite an utter lack of industry support and facing countless obstacles, Latino directors rose to the challenge and got their pictures made.

Critic Carlos Aguilar takes you on a journey through four films, all of which use the truth as a bendable, adaptable tool, whether through improvised dialogue, casting non-professional actors, or having people play alternate versions of themselves in real-life scenarios. From LALIFF’s 2025 lineup, he gives you a movie to stream at home and a movie to catch in the theater. Then he takes you on a deep dive into two features he saw at the 2026 LALIFF this past week.

Happy Watching,

— Vanessa

An official selection at last year's LALIFF, the debut feature by Dominican American filmmaker Joel Vargas offers a portrait of young manhood in the Bronx. Rico (Juan Collado) is a 19-year-old about to become a father. While he tries to make a living selling boozy nutcrackers on the beach and deal with his own unhealed absent-father trauma, tensions rise inside his bilingual household: Rico and his pregnant girlfriend live with his mother and sister. The lived-in performances and fly-on-the-wall approach to capturing their interactions through improvised dialogue in wide shots make the viewer feel they’re intruding on the private matters of a real family.

Playing in theaters nationwide.

LALIFF 2025’s closing night film is a docufiction where co-director Pasqual Gutierrez plays a version of himself to explore his anxieties about becoming a father while working as a music video director. To spend more time with his pregnant partner, Pasqual hires an inept doppelganger, Miguel (Miguel Huerta), to take his place during his professional commitments. For most of the increasingly absurd vignettes, the static camera sits far from the characters, as if surveilling their lives. Underneath the absurdity lies a story about the sacrifices professional aspirations demand and a critique of the entertainment industry's self-seriousness.

Streaming on MUBI and available on VOD.

— By Carlos Aguilar

Fiction often allows artists to reach an emotional truthfulness that reality alone might not convey precisely. But when make-believe blends with the world as it is, something else surfaces. Think of movies like “Borat,” where the humor comes from unsuspecting people reacting to a storyteller’s performance in the real world. Fact and fabrication collaborate to engender work that blurs the lines between the two.

That’s the case for two docufictions that screened at the 25th edition of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival (LALIFF): opener “Valentina” by Tatti Ribeiro, and Colombian filmmaker Carolina González Valencia’s “How to Clean a House in 10 Easy Steps.” Both titles incorporate fictional elements within mostly documentary realms.

In the case of “Valentina,” Ribeiro inserts the title character into real-world settings that elicit unscripted interactions with locals in El Paso, Texas. Latina actor Keyla Monterroso Mejia, known for her parts in “Abbot Elementary” and “The Studio,” brings her comedy persona to the role of a young woman struggling financially and fed up with the bureaucratic hurdles that make life more challenging for working-class people. For the conceit to land effectively, it necessitates an extroverted, open-hearted disposition from the performer, so that exchanges with everyday individuals feel spontaneous.

“Valentina” is constructed from vignettes that, in the reality of the narrative, take place over 48 hours in the life of the lively heroine. It begins as she and her brother (played by Monterroso Mejia’s real-life sibling Nathan Monterroso) cross the border from Ciudad Juárez to El Paso. Once on this side, she spends time at a diner chatting with recent Latino immigrants, works for a historical reenactment company, hires the services of a spiritual healer, and confronts local representatives at a city council meeting about how they profit from the poor.

Each connection she makes reveals specific preoccupations pertinent not only to life as part of a diaspora but also of people existing in a border town where the line between the two countries appears less rigid than some might like to admit. It’s a fascinating vision.