LATIMES: Fresh looks at Cuba in the Los Angeles Film Festival

In director Gerardo Chijona's queasy romantic drama, a young country girl fleeing her sexually abusive father falls in with a group of homeless teenagers in Havana. She gets dragged into a scenario that entails ample doses of sex, drugs, rock 'n' roll and petty crime, menaced by the threat of AIDS but filled with the adrenaline rush of free will.
By contrast, Fernando Pérez's “Suite Habana” (made in 2003) is a sublime, virtually wordless tone poem about a day in the lives of 10 ordinary Cubans —a railway worker, a peanut vendor, a father nurturing his son who has Down syndrome— and the emotional and spiritual bounty that sustains them amid relentless material deprivation.

Two far more upbeat assessments of whether Cuba can resolve its contradictions can be found in “Habana Eva,” (…) and in the documentary “Unfinished Spaces.”