The festival features the winners of the 6th annual Cinema Tropical Awards. A couple highlights:

Ixcanul, Guatemala
The film follows María (played by María Mercedes Coroy), a 17-year-old Mayan girl who lives and works in a coffee plantation that sits at the base of an active volcano in Guatemala. Although Maria dreams of going to the big city, her condition as an indigenous woman does not permit her to change her destiny, where an arranged wedding is waiting for her. A snake bite forces her to go out into the modern world where her life is saved, but at a steep price. 

Jauja, Argentina
An astonishingly beautiful western starring Viggo Mortensen, Jauja begins in a remote outpost in Patagonia during the late 1800s. Captain Gunnar Dinesen has come from abroad with his fifteen-year-old daughter to take an engineering job with the Argentine army. Being the only female in the area, Ingeborg creates quite a stir among the men. She falls in love with a young soldier, and one night they run away together. When Dinesen realizes what has happened, he decides to venture into enemy territory, against his men’s wishes, to find the young couple. 

New York: Feb. 26 - 28 at Museum of the Moving Image.