From Paraguay, THE HEIRESSES: Marcelo Martinessi's first full-length film is a rich and moving character/situation study

It is unusual enough to view a movie from Paraguay, but when that movie is also a first full-length film from an unknown director that turns out to be not only thoroughly involving but first-class in every respect, this is grounds for rejoicing. So it is with THE HEIRESSES (Las herederas), written and directed by Marcelo Martinessi.

Señor Martinessi (shown at right) has managed to combine themes involving class, change, entitlement, old money vs new, relationships, power, control and prison (of various sorts), all the while providing a study of character and situation that is really quite close to perfection. It has been a long while since I've seen a first film this well done in all areas -- on both sides of the camera.

The tale told is of two women -- Chela and Chiquita -- each from a wealthy (formerly, at least) family who have been lovers/partners for decades but have come upon hard times, due to which they are now forced to sell many of their most precious belongings.

As essayed by Margarita Irun (shown above, who plays Chiquita) and especially Ana Brun (below, left, as Chela), who has the more important role, these women resonate hugely. Ms Brun, in what is apparently her debut role, could hardly be better, as she slowly and quietly wraps us in her at first stand-offish but finally almost warm and completely understandable near embrace.

We get to know the two women, as well as their circle of friends and neighbors, especially once Chiquita has been "removed" to some extent from Chela's immediate life. How and why provides one of the film's many interesting plot devices, leading to some very quietly surprising changes along the way.

We get a look a Paraguay's prison system (women's variety, above), as well as a number of glimpses at the elderly, card-playing old-money wealthy (below) and their gossipy, judgmental habits,

and in particular one younger woman, Angy (very well-played by Ana Ivanova, below,  right), to whom Chela has clearly taken a shine. What happens between these two provides a good deal of the small but irrevocable changes that occur throughout the film, many of which involve those that Chela must make in order to grow and survive.

The manner in which Martinessi has laid out this growth and change is calibrated in such a way -- never too obvious but with enough information provided to keep up interested and on our toes -- that his movie proves consistently compelling and finally moving and even, yes, uplifting. Yet in a very minor key.

What we first perceive as a kind of love is eventually understood to be control. How Chela learns to circumvent some of this makes for one of the great, low-key pleasures of this just-beginning movie-going year.

From Distrib Films US and running 97 minutes, The Heiresses opens in its U.S. theatrical premiere this Wednesday, January 16, in New York City at Film Forum. Elsewhere? Well, it's scheduled to play Los Angeles at Laemmle's Royal in early March, but I can't find any other currently scheduled playdates. But it is difficult to imagine that a foreign film this good won't eventually hit major cities around the USA. Keep watch.

From Paraguay: Maneglia and Schembori's SEVEN BOXES has charm, spirit--and body parts

If the new chase thriller SEVEN BOXES becomes the first film from Paraguay that you've seen, don't be surprised. Its creators Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schembori, who directed and also wrote (with some help from Tito Chamorro) are evidently well-known in their little South American country and have studied movies well and smartly and appear to have learned a lot. Their clever little film steals from just about everything else you've seen down the decades yet their setting seems so unusual and shabbily exotic and the cast of characters is such a unique mix of the quirky, creepy and sweet that you may find it very difficult not to give over to the odd charms herein.

Maneglia and Schembori (shown above, with Ms S on the right) have concocted a surprisingly complicated scenario, despite the movie's advertising tag line above (which happens not to be true), but their film-making skills are such that they allow us to easily follow the plot's many cleverly constructed convolutions.

A teenager named Victor (the spunky Celso Franco, above and on those TV Screens) thinks he has lucked into a "dream" delivery job of taking seven boxes out for a little walk from their residence in a butcher shop in order to avoid being seen by the authorities. What's in the boxes? Money or drugs, we imagine. For this, he'll earn enough dough to buy a nice cell phone. If only. (That's one of the sleazy butchers giving our boy instructions, below.)

As the plot thickens, we're introduced to Victor's sister and her very pregnant co-worker, who labor in a Chinese restaurant where the owner's son has eyes for sis (the film offers an interesting look at Asian immi-grants in Paraguay); some rather inept kidnappers; a father whose infant child needs medication, a group of nasty Paraguayan low-lifes (below), and a pert and very likable young woman who is clearly carrying a torch for our Victor (played by the very talented and spikey Lali Gonzalez).

How all these mix and mingle proves frightening, funny, surprising and exciting. The filmmakers have their pacing down pat, and their cast delivers good performances first to last. Once the wheels (and wheelbarrows used for delivery) are set in motion, the movie clicks and clacks along like an unstoppable locomotive.

A kind of coming-of-age tale, Seven Boxes' ace-in-the-hole is how much charm and spirit it provides, which is particularly commendable, considering how grizzly the goings-on become. Yet the film's sweetness easily surmounts its body count.

Seven Boxes, from Breaking Glass Pictures and running 100 minutes, opens in theaters (the listing is shown below) this Friday, February 7, and simultaneously will be available via VOD and iTunes.

In New York City--Cinema Village;  Los Angeles, CA--Downtown Independent;  Pasadena, CA--Laemmle Playhouse 7; Chicago, IL--Siskel Film Center; Sante Fe, NM--Jean Cocteau Cinema; Scottsdale, AZ--Harkins Shea. The following Friday, February 14, look for it in Toronto, ON--Carlton Cinema; Miami, FL--Coral Gables Art Cinema; Saskatoon, SK--Roxy Theater; and elsewhere across the country & Canada in the weeks ahead.

108 (CUCHILLO DE PALO), Renate Costa Perdomo's quiet documentary about a dictatorship and a dear, dead uncle

Invited to 27 international film festivals and the winner of Best Film at two of these, 108 (CUCHILLO DE PALO) is the quietly devasta-ting documentary from a young Paraguayan woman, Renate Costa Perdomo, who now lives in Spain, but retur-ned to her South American home-land to make this, her first full-length documentary. If the title of this movie sound like perhaps a street address to the uninitiated and/or non-Spanish-speaking, it's not. Both the number and the phrase are epithets for a homosexual.

The number 108 became a kind of code for a gay man; cuchillo de palo means a stick-like knife, hence a useless tool (think of it, in a macho, Latin America country, as a limp dick). Both the number and the name were used to describe the filmmaker's uncle Rodolfo Costa (shown on the left in the photo at right), also known as Hector Torres, an alias he went by during the time -- 1954 through 1989 -- that Paraguay was under the thumb of right-wing dictator Alfredo Stroessner Matiauda.

Stroessner himself, as we learn from some of the interviewees here, had a gay son. But instead of this mellowing the man and opening the door to understanding and acceptance (as it might today, in a more democratic society), it only made matters worse for gays during the last half of the century past. Just how much worse, we come to know via the many interviews -- with relatives, especially the filmmaker's father (at left) and brother to her dead uncle; friends and/or lovers of Rodolfo; and other homosexuals who speak about their life during this period of repression, torture and murder.

Ms Costa Perdomo (shown at right) has made a quiet,  strange and sad movie, in which, when she appears, is usually as a blur or in very soft focus. We hear her asking questions, but she wants the people she is speaking with to register most strongly. They do. What they tell us is anything but reassuring -- about both the past and the present.

How her uncle -- whom she clearly enjoyed and admired as a child -- came to die remains a mystery, and one that it is clear his own family still prefers not to solve. She gives us the circumstances of that death and what followed in pieces, explai-ning, "I think I started to get to know my uncle the day he died."

Despite the negativity and repression on view, particularly from her father, who is still full of denial, anger and the crap religion of a Catholic Church under the thumb of a right-wing dictator (similar, I would guess, to that of Spain under Franco). Renate's father actually refers to his brother as a monster. "And what must a monster do? Change! Recognize his mistakes and change!" This sounds like something my own father would have said -- hooked as he was on a poorly perceived idea of the Christian religion to the exclusion of everything else. (From what the New Testament of the Bible tells us, Jesus, the fellow who preached those lovely Beatitudes from The Sermon on the Mount, would never have uttered something so crass and unfeeling.)

Despite the subject matter, Ms Costa Perdomo has made a surprisingly warm and intimate little movie. Her own quiet but insistent attempts to get her relatives to face up to things go a long way toward making this sad story more bearable. And her interviews with Paraguay's gays are thoughtful and pointed. One fellow, still fearing reprisals, keeps his face hidden. "Politics may change," he tells us, "but people's mentality does not."

From the beginning of the film, we see the little corner laundry/apartment where Rodolfo/Hector lived (above). By the movie's end and we see it for the final time, we've learned so much more than we knew at the beginning that it seems a whole world has opened up before us. You will wonder, by the finale, if father and daughter are still speaking. Probably so, for you can't image that this talented and feeling woman would ever do to her father what he had done to his own brother.

108 (Cuchillo De Palo), from Icarus Films and running 91 minutes, opens tomorrow, Monday, March 18, for a week's run at the Maysles Cinema, New York City. Click here tickets and screening times and here for directions.