Don Plutarco, his son Genaro and his grandson Lucio live a double life: on one hand they are musicians and humble farmers, on the other they support the campesina peasant guerilla movement's armed efforts against the oppressive government.

From mountain villages to middle-class households, from peasant rebellions to presidential elections, the 2008 Latin American Film Festival is bringing to CU five new stories of life in the Americas.

Beginning Friday, April 4 and running till Thursday, April 10, the festival will be held at Boardman’s Art Theatre in downtown Champaign with two screenings a day, except for Saturday, when there will be three.

The five films span Central and South America, representing the established film industries of Mexico, Brazil and Argentina and the emerging industries of Bolivia and Peru. Three of the films are debuts from young directors. Professor Angelina Cotler, the festival director, said her goal was to help expose the U.S. to Latin American cinema. Boardman’s Art Theatre, she felt, was a place that would support such a project.

Cotler found the movies by their success at other festivals. While the region is too large to represent every country, her five selections are some of the more renowned and distinct Latin American works from the past few years.

The Violin, from Mexico, was a 2006 feature made by Francisco Vargas. Shot in black-and-white, an aged violinist and farmer — Don Plutarco — supports a guerilla uprising against the military. He sneaks into his occupied village, playing the violin, trying to recover abandoned ammunition. The film is cast with non-professionals, including Angel Tavira as Plutarco, whose performance won the best actor award at Cannes.

The Brazilian film Alice’s House is director Chico Teixeira’s first fictional work. Released in 2007, the story follows Alice, a Sao Paolo manicurist who lives with her husband, three sons and mother. With a decaying marriage, Alice thinks she can find some romance with a childhood friend.

Madeinusa was the 2006 debut of Peruvian director Claudia Llosa. Each year between Good Friday and Easter Sunday, a small Andean village forgets all sin and lets everyone do what they want. A geologist from the capital comes to the town, making the villagers self-conscious and disrupting the customs that were once habit. In the film, the villagers speak Quechua, an indigenous language. Cotler said Peruvian cinema usually disregards Andean culture and language, making Madeinusa a kind of revelation.

“It was a big commercial feature in which they recognized Quechua. People did not expect it from a director that was a middle/high-class woman. This is something that for many years was a barrier in the country, a deep linguistic barrier. It’s a fantastic step,” Cotler said.

The only documentary of the festival, Cocalero, was a 2007 portrait of Evo Morales’ Bolivian presidential campaign. First-time director Alejandro Landes follows Morales — a former coca farmer — as he connects both with rural highlanders and wealthy donors to secure his run for office.

Finally, from Argentina, The Aura was director Fabian Bielinsky’s last film before his early death in 2006. Made a year prior, it was only his second production, a follow-up to the heist drama Nine Queens. The Aura builds a neo-noir stage for its story of a taxidermist that thinks he can commit the perfect crime.

While Cotler has brought together these films for all of CU, she hopes that the festival will draw the Spanish-speaking community to the theater. “I want them to go, to be proud. It’s your opportunity to go to a film and not read subtitles,” she said.

It’s another chance to see what cinema means away from Hollywood, south into the rest of the American continents, south into a world of a half-billion people.