Bolivia

Café society, Argentine-style: a simmering mix of drugs, debts and racism. Freddy (Flores) is a Bolivian immigrant without a work permit. Displaced when the Yankees burned down the fields where he worked, he's taken on by a wary coffee-shop proprietor whose other cheap labour is half-Paraguayan Rosa (Sánchez), and whose customers generally confuse Freddy for Peruvian, when they're not hassling Rosa or bemoaning their own crises. Life here is cheap. Shot in grainy b/w, spanning 60 hours or so and only thrice venturing outside the café bounds, this gritty little number sketches with matter of fact realism the vagaries and desolation of the urban uprooted and marginalised, with flashes of human connection jostling with random intimidation. Wonderfully (under)played by the cast.