Latin America Oscar Bids Explore Indigenous Life, Homosexuality

​Thirteen Latin American films exploring socioeconomic issues, including border politics, homosexuality, domestic work and Indigenous lives will be competing for the 2016 Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Argentina, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Costa Rica, Dominican Republic, Guatemala, Mexico, Panama, Paraguay, Peru, Uruguay and Venezuela are the countries who hope to bring home the golden statue that has only been won twice by a Latin American country: Argentina won in 2010 for “The Secret in Their Eyes,” and in 1985 for “The Official Story.”

Mexico seeks to break this historical record with “600 Miles,” which narrates the story of a young Mexican man who finds himself struggling in the world of arms trafficking between the U.S. and Mexico while under the watchful eye of an agent on the other side of the border.

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The often-neglected lives of domestic workers come in the spotlight in the Brazilian film “The Second Mother.” The Oscar hopeful, produced by Anna Muylaert, brings to the screen the struggle of Val, a low-income woman from an impoverished Brazilian region that abandons her child to move to Sao Paolo and work as a housekeeper.

The Dominican Republic opted for “Sand Dollars,” a film that centers on a relationship of convenience between a white French woman and a female Dominican sex worker.

The film, its website states, reveals the “contradictions of having to pay for company, to pay to solve everyone’s problems, the wish to belong, to be helpful and useful, and the impotence of not knowing how and to always feel like an outsider.”

The brutal reality of the exploitative relationship between Panama and the United States is brought to life in the documentary “Box 25.” Based on 114 recently discovered letters written by men that built the Panama Canal, the meticulously-researched film documents the intimately personal experiences of torturous working conditions, rampant discrimination, illness as well as these men’s hopes and dreams.

Meanwhile, Venezuela and Colombia sent in two films narrating the lives of Indigenous peoples.

“Embrace of the Serpent” is Colombia’s Oscar hopeful, a story on the forty-year-long search for a sacred healing plant that brings together two U.S. American scientists and an Amazonian shaman who is the last survivor of his tribe.

Venezuela’s “Gone With the River” is a rare film for being spoken almost entirely in the Indigenous Warao language and bringing to screen a fictitious story of Dauna, a member of the Warao tribe who is forced to confront cultural norms and traditions after deciding to move away from her people located in the Orinoco delta to pursue academic interests.

*Correction: A previous version of this post said there were 12 entrants: there are 13. It also said Argentina won for “Wild Tales,” that film was in fact only nominated.