A photograph.
A voice on tape.
Moving images of everyday life, evoking the double meaning of that word, “moving.”
I previewed only a fraction of the 41st Chicago Latino Film Festival, the first full day of which is Friday, with the fest continuing through April 13th at the Landmark Century Centre on Clark Street. But even with a too-small sampling of festival titles, often a theme emerges — in this instance an idea of how memories of our lives, or the lives of others, can be reclaimed or questioned years afterward.
Sometime around the age of 70, according to one of many different female voices we hear in the beautiful new film “Memories of a Burning Body,” women may come to a point when “we allow ourselves the luxury to pull out the weeds.” It’s an evocative metaphor for painful, half-buried memories, or misappropriated guilt so deep it takes two hands to do the pulling.
Winner of the audience award at the 2025 Berlin International Film Festival, “Memories of a Burning Body” comes from Costa Rica-based writer-director Antonella Sudasassi Furniss. (It’s one of two Costa Rica films in this year’s lineup, which represents 21 countries of origin including Central and South America, Spain, Portugal and the U.S.) A docu-fiction hybrid with an unusual, almost liquid flow, it’ll screen at8 p.m. Friday and 8:45 p.m. Sunday.
The words on the screen at the start of “Burning Body” put it succinctly: “This film is the conversation I never had with my grandmothers.” Pre-COVID, Sudasassi Furniss began talking with women ranging in age, from their mid-60s to early 90s, about female pleasure and what these women learned, or didn’t, from mothers, fathers, nuns, friends and husbands.
From the recorded memories of eight interview subjects, the filmmaker then adapted their stories (details of which, in some cases, never having been shared with anyone) into a screenplay. “Burning Body” tells one fictional woman’s story, divided into thirds, with three different actresses — in ascending order of age, Juliana Filloy, Paulina Bernini and the marvelous Sol Carballo — portraying a kind of Everywoman in childhood, young adulthood and around 70.
The film concerns far more than variations on a single theme. It’s a weave of expectations, misogyny, conditions and societal forces that too often prescribe women’s lives, bodies and fates. None of it feels reductive or simplistic; much of it conveys serious joy and tactile discovery. As the three leading performers come and go, sharing the same apartment setting, a walk down one hallway might lead to a memory of Catholic school sex education (very light on the education part), while another hallway or transition takes us into some increasingly frightening scenes from a marriage, before and after Bernini’s character gives birth to her first child. Sudasassi Furniss’ directorial instincts are so light-fingered yet so effective, we really do experience her film the way most of us — maybe all of us — sort through who we were, and are. And what life can mean right now.
“Memories of a Burning Body” began with a filmmaker talking, and getting real people to reminisce on tape. From Mexico, the ripped-from-the-headlines drama “Crocodiles” (screening 6:30 p.m. Sunday and 5:45 p.m. April 8) hinges on a Veracruz investigative reporter’s tense meeting, in a church, with a source for an inflammatory story she’s risking her life to uncover involving the local cartels. What she tape-records is one terrified man’s account of what he has seen and, so far, survived.
“Crocodiles” is a world premiere, and the festival screenings will feature appearances by director J. Xavier Velasco and leading actor Hoze Meléndez. Based on the real-life murders of several journalists, the film has its overheated elements but it’s undeniably effective. And at a time when journalism’s demonization by those in power has become a fact of life and death, Velasco’s film is both a risk and a warning cry.
I also caught three Chicago-made short film playing at different times on the festival calendar, including an impressive directorial debut from “Chicago Fire” cast member Joe Miñoso. “Paper Flowers” (6:15 p.m. April 12 and 3:30 p.m. April 13) begins with a boy with a Camcorder, running around his Chicago backyard, chasing and filming his sister. This Chicago slice of life takes place in the recent past. But Miñoso’s simple, sure miniature speaks directly to the early 2025 America’s rampant deportations — and the reminder that recording our memories may be more important, and heartbreaking, than we knew.
The 41st Chicago Latino Film Festival run April 3-14 at Landmark Century Centre Cinemas, 2828 N. Clark St.; special screenings at the Davis Theater in Lincoln Square; more at chicagolatinofilmfestival.org
Michael Phillips is a Tribune critic.
