JOSÉ
Director: Li Cheng Run Time: 85 min. Release Year: 2020 Language: Spanish
Starring: Ana Cecilia Mota, Enrique Salanic, Esteban López, Jhakelyn Waleska Gonzalez Gonzalez, Manolo Herrera
José lives with his mother in Guatemala: a tough life in one of the world’s most dangerous, religious, and impoverished countries. José is her youngest and favorite child, and her life is going to church and selling sandwiches. He spends his days on crowded buses and in the streets delivering food. Resigned and aloof, in free moments he plays with his phone and looks for random sex. When he meets Luis, José is thrust into a dimension of passion and pain and self-reflection that was previously unimaginable.
Winner of multiple awards, including the Queer Lion from the 75th Annual Venice Film Festival, José is a gripping, layered and beautifully honest story about one working-class young man’s struggle to find himself. Made in the neorealist filmmaking tradition, the film is a nuanced and vivid look at being gay in Central America.