Scraps on Cinema

In the city of Puebla, Mexico around the turn of this century, an aspiring chef named Iván (Armando Espitia) finds his culinary degree counts for little after a year in the scrub room of a small diner. Passed over for a position in the kitchen in favor of the boss's nephew, he is told that he lacks patience, and should feel grateful that he even has a job. Going nowhere fast, he struggles to keep in touch with his mother, who takes care of his terminally ill father, and to stay in the good graces of his estranged girlfriend, who maintains sole custody over their son. What's more, Iván is a homosexual, and the increasing implausibility of his protecting this secret in a society of entrenched patriarchal, cultural conservatism only compounds upon his precarious social and interpersonal position. One night, Iván and his best friend Sandra (comedian Michelle Rodríguez, not to be confused with the American actor) decide to get wrecked at a new gay bar. It's there that he meets G...

On a beach in the Dominican Republic, a bartender named Usnavi (Anthony Ramos) tells four local children a fairy tale of New York: Once upon a time, in the historically Latino neighborhood of Washington Heights in Upper Manhattan at the height of summer, a younger Usnavi is on the verge of leaving his bodega  behind to return to the D.R., intent on reclaiming and reviving his late father's business (apparently destroyed in Hurricane Maria). With three days to settle his affairs, he finds that his little cousin Sonny (Gregory Diaz IV), being too young to have "island memories," has no interest in leaving his own island behind. For what it's worth, the undocumented teenager, having come of age in the Obama era, is a blooming activist, more interested in joining the youthful phalanx against socio-economic injustice than in retreating into nostalgia for the Old World. The shy Usnavi also has his eyes set on the lovely Vanessa (Melissa Barrera), whose own near-term dreams ...