El Sueno Del Caiman

Beautifully rendered in stunning black-and-white, this dark comedy evokes the classic Mexican cinema of the 50s and Latino soap opera in equal measure. Inaki is a young man living in Spain who has joined up with an elderly man to become a petty thief. A routine robbery goes awry when the old man dies unexpectedly, and Inaki finds himself on the run. He returns to Mexico to hide out for a while in the rooming house where his father Patxi lives with his brother, El Caiman; the house is run by an upbeat drag queen named Aunt Carmen. Inaki begins dating Carmen's niece, which fuels Carmen's hopes that the young man will become a doctor. But Patxi and Caiman are wise to the boys past, and soon he finds himself moving once again toward crime. All of the characters are motivated by a common dream of liberation, which they navigate clumsily towards. EL SUENO DEL CAIMAN won the prize for Best Feature Film in the 2002 Guadalajara Mexican Film Festival, among many other honors it received on the festival circuit.