Kids and Scoundrels

The Palm Beach International Film Festival is a far more manageable affair than its neighbor in Fort Lauderdale. Lauderdale's big festival runs more than a month, dragging in a gazillion theaters and any good, decent, or even just quirky movie it can lay hands on. PFIFF runs just eight days. And though it will open with the new Woody Harrelson poker comedy The Grand — just like FLIFF did five months ago — it then turns into its own thing, with flicks you'll most likely never get a chance to see again from a healthy cross-section of countries. Many are worth your time. Some are so bad you'll want to rip your eyes out before the opening credits are half done. Read on.

La Americana It's easy to see why Nicholas Bruckman chose Maria del Carmen Rojas as his primary subject in this documentary. It's that face — open, stolid, heroic even, though stung by the bitterness of a cruel dilemma. Carmen has the kind of face a sculptor might exult in. An undocumented immigrant from Bolivia, Carmen is a New York cleaning lady/babysitter/dog-groomer who has left her wheelchair-bound daughter back in Cochabamba so she can make enough money in America for medical treatments. In other words, she's just one of the 11 million whose immigration status has fired debate. The one thing that the debate usually sidesteps — besides the by-the-numbers newspaper features about Teresita and Jose in Gringolandia — is the humanity of those "illegals." In a straight-ahead documentary style, with only a few bars of Bolivian quena music here and there and no dramatic reenactments, Bruckman captures their humanity by the gallon in one of the saddest movies I've ever seen. There's the vast, stinging distance between mother and bottomlessly needy daughter, a distance incapable of being overcome thanks to zero tolerance from the immigration system — until, after six years of separation, Carmen decides she's had enough. There are the bitter realities back home in Cochabamba: Carmen's stash of saved twenty-dollar bills doesn't go far to help little Carla (struck down at age 8 by a bus). Carmen must carry her now 15-year-old daughter up and down the stairs of medical buildings where the doctors conclude, sorry, they can't help the girl.

While we're checking out Carmen, she's checking out us, asking politely about this "American dream" thing everybody talks about. In her final days in America, somebody takes Carmen to the Statue of Liberty, where she reads the famous lines: "give me your tired, your poor."

"Words that are as empty as the statue," Carmen says dispassionately. Let's take Tom Tancredo and Joyce Kaufman to the theater, strap them into seats, and force them to watch. (Friday, April 11, 3 p.m., Sunrise Cinemas at Mizner Park) Edmund Newton