Museum of the Moving Image and Cinema Tropical present the 2017 edition of the Cinema Tropical Festival, featuring celebrating the winners of the 7th annual Cinema Tropical Awards. Here's a couple highlights:

Santa Teresa y otras historias (Santa Teresa & Other Stories), Dominican Republic/USA/Mexico 2015
As stories of violence in Mexican border towns continue to make international headlines, alternative ways of making sense of this brutal reality are more vital than ever. In his auspicious debut fiction film, Dominican filmmaker Nelson Carlo de los Santos cleverly extrapolates from Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s unfinished, posthumously published novel 2666 to explore a multiplicity of perspectives and voices in a town riven by bloodshed. In the fictional town of Santa Teresa (a stand-in for Ciudad Juárez) on the border between Mexico and the United States, the researcher Juan de Dios Martínez straddles the line between journalism and detective work, investigating a handful of crimes and abuses perpetrated on women and workers of the zone. Mixing fiction, nonfiction, and essay, Santa Teresa & Other Stories is a lyrical, experimental take on the humanitarian crisis in Mexico brought on by the drug wars.

Tempestad, Mexico 2016
Tatiana Huezo’s second documentary feature (after her acclaimed debut The Tiniest Place) recounts the story of two women: Miriam, who was wrongly accused of human trafficking and imprisoned in a jail controlled by a drug cartel, and Adela, a circus performer who has been looking for her kidnapped daughter for over a decade. Through a subjective and emotional journey, and with striking cinematography by Ernesto Prado (who was nominated for an American Society of Cinematographers Award for his work in the film), Tempestad conveys the paralyzing power of fear and reflects the impact of the violence and impunity that afflict Mexico.

New York: Feb. 24 - 26 at Museum of the Moving Image. Check here for full lineup and details.