This offbeat feature documentary is part Western, part soap opera, part film noir, and part female buddy picture. Out of Sight incorporates interviews, cinéma-vérité sequences, and dramatic reenactments to tell the story of Diane Starin, a 34-year-old northern California cowgirl, and her rocky relationship with Herb Martin, a man in his sixties with whom she shares a love of horses. This intimate, unflinchingly honest, and continually surprising documentary reveals the dreams and difficulties of Diane as a young, thoroughly modern single woman, who also just happens to be blind, struggling for her independence amidst a real-life cast of colorful supporting characters.

This controversial Cuban feature involves a Cuban mother, now living in Miami, who returns to Havana to visit her son and his family, whom she had abandoned ten years earlier. The psychological confrontations which ensue offer a sensitive analysis of the lejania, the distance or separation among members of the same family, created by the Cuban revolution.

This first Cuban musical transposes two characters from Yoruba mythology into present-day Havana, pitting the charming, sexy Shango, the Yoruba god of thunder (here, an irresistible bully who lives off of his wife) against the earnest, hard-working Ogun (in this version, a machinist at a nearby farming collective) in a comic/ heroic battle of wits that is half mythology and half Busby Berkeley.

This classic of the Latin American cinema is based on actual historical events involving the brutal military suppression of a series of strikes during the early Twenties by rural workers in the southernmost province of Argentina. The film's narrative, set within a richly detailed social context and mounted as a colorful action film, features fascinating character studies of the main protagonists, including the anarcho-syndicalist leaders of the workers' movement and the ruthless military commander who realizes too late that he is merely a tool of the wealthy landowners.

This feature documentary dramatizes the complex problem of kidnapping in Colombia, a country where the disparity between rich and poor has turned kidnapping for ransom into a virtual business, with a kidnapping occurring every seven hours. In 1985, 20-year-old Sylvia Motta, daughter of a wealthy industrialist, was kidnapped by ten armed men. Director Camila Motta, the victim's sister, recreates the harrowing three months during which Sylvia was chained to a bed while their father negotiated for her life. The film utilizes a montage of interviews, dramatic re-creations, still photos, slow motion, and actual recordings of the series of telephone negotiations between the kidnappers and the father. The result is a dramatically compelling portrait of the psychological torment experienced by the victim and her family and the ruthless but thoroughly professional criminal methods of her captors.

A profile of one of Latin America's leading musical artists, this film chronicles Sosa's 1984 national concert tour following her return to Argentina after years in exile. As she travels throughout the country, performing at concert halls, music festivals and isolated rural areas, concert footage is interspersed with breathtaking scenes of the Argentine countryside.

This award-winning documentary chronicles a year in the life of STAR Theater, a teenage theater company which uses drama to help young people avoid risks and grow up safely in the age of AIDS. The film combines intimate profiles of the young actors with scenes from their performances, poignantly revealing that the performers are struggling with the same coming-of-age problems in their own lives that they are addressing on stage.

This feature-length documentary offers an exciting, inside look at the phenomenal growth of the spoken word movement and its latest manifestation as literary blood sport the Slam Poetry competition. Emmy Award-winning filmmaker Paul Devlin follows New York City's novice Slam Team as they journey to the National Poetry Slam in Portland, Ore-gon, where they engage in poetic battle with 120 performance poets from twenty-seven regional teams over four days of intensive elimination bouts. In the process, we enjoy not only the raw energy and remarkable talent of some of the greatest performance poets in the country, but a good old-fashioned tale of heroes and villains, Machiavellian strategizing, personal animosities, and fulfilling triumphs amidst the dramatic tension of fiery competition.

This romantic comedy portrays a typical young Cuban couple, sexually liberated, who nonetheless cannot cope with the affair between his mother and her father. The young woman comes around first, but the young man cannot accept what he considers scandalous behavior for a woman of fifty. The result is a series of misunderstandings and confusions which comment on the generation gap, machismo, and related themes.

This lively documentary chronicles the development of salsa music in New York City during the 50s, 60s, and 70s through the experience of Larry Harlow, a Jewish-American musician from Brooklyn who became one of salsa's greatest stars. Harlow takes us from his childhood roots into the clubs and personalities of salsa's golden era the Catskills, the Cheetah, Arsenio Rodrâguez, Celia Cruz, the Fania All-Stars. The film also features interviews and commentary by such legendary performers as Cheo Feliciano, Santos Col÷n, Ismael Miranda, and Don Tite Curet Alonso.

This compelling Argentine political thriller dramatizes the life of a trade union militant who is gradually corrupted as he rises within the union bureaucracy. Skillfully interweaving documentary and fictional sequences, the film traces over seventeen years of Argentina's most explosive political history.

In the early Sixties, the Brazilian peasant leader, Joao Pedro Teixeira, was assassinated by two gunmen hired by local landowners. Teixeira's story was being filmed as a docudrama when the 1964 military coup prevented the completion of the film. The entire crew was imprisoned and their equipment confiscated. Twenty years later, in a more democratic Brazil, director Eduardo Coutinho recovered his confiscated film and located the murdered peasant's widow and children. Coutinho's interviews with her and other peasant families are interwoven with sequences from the original docudrama to produce an unusually provocative historical film.

This feature-length animated cartoon for adults is a hilariously funny spoof of horror and gangster movies done up in an outrageously caricatured, bawdy style reminiscent of Fritz the Cat. The wacky plot involves Professor von Dracula, a vampire scientist who leaves Transylvania for Cuba where he invents "Vampisol," a potion that allows vampires to survive in sunlight. When the Professor announces his intention to donate his formula free of charge to vampires all over the world, the European group of vampires from Dusseldorf and the Vampire Mafia from Chicago try to steal the formula. The ensuing action escalates crazily as assorted bad guys, police, vampires and other monsters, musicians, tourists, and our hero are all caught up in the chase.

This documentary tells the story of three people imprisoned as children in Terezin, a WWII Nazi concentration camp for Central European Jews, many of whom were eventually shipped to Auschwitz and other extermination centers. Zuzana Justman, the filmmaker, herself spent two years in Terezin, so her film conveys an unusually personal quality. Interviews with the Terezin survivors, filmed in their homes and with their families in the U.S., Austria and the Czech Republic, are blended with excerpts from their diaries and drawings from the wartime years.

Tamara, a tragically hip young woman, is caught up in a superficial world of hot coffee and steamy romance. When her dreamboat, Raif, walks into her life and sweeps her off her feet, she thinks she has it all cappuccino galore, cool clothes and a wicked boyfriend. Unfortunately, Raif sees things differently.

Max decides to hold up the local deli. It's late, few people are around it's an easy target. Or so he thinks, as one thing after another goes wrong for poor Max.

A young novelist, suffering from a bad case of writer's block, and on the verge of blowing a fuse, discovers a shocking new means of artistic inspiration.

In this visually inventive comedy, Ra-mona, a "punked-out" older sister, unexpectedly returns home to her mother and two young brothers. None of them, however, are aware that her luggage is filled with cockroaches, and the resulting roach invasion becomes a catalyst for changing this comically dysfunctional family.

A hungry diner visits a new restaurant with an unusual bill of fare. After being served his order, however, his selection is criticized by the waiter, the bus boy, and another customer, and our befuddled diner opts for another dish he hopes will be less controversial.

This provocative animated film, featuring a voracious mongrel dog and an evocative synthesizer score by Kasandra Woodring, uses allegorical and documentary images, maps and texts to explore and deconstruct the history of the conquest of the Americas.

A sexy little film about celibacy. Sullivan, a Manhattan artist, and a conservative old flame return to her apartment after their first date in six years. After an unexpected kiss, he announces that he is celibate... for "spiritual reasons." Sullivan isn't buying it, however, because she knows him too well. Armed with scotch, cigarettes and sexual fearlessness, she chips away at his intellectual armor, with results neither of them bargained for.