Violent Butterflies by Adolfo Dávila
The 2025 Brooklyn Film Festival, which kicked off on May 30 and runs through June 8, offers a dynamic lineup of global cinema, with Latin American and U.S. Latinx filmmakers playing a prominent role. This year’s selection features an array of aesthetic styles and urgent themes, showcasing the region’s ongoing impact on independent film.
From Mexico, Violent Butterflies / Violentas mariposas by Adolfo Dávila delivers a blistering critique of social and political violence, centering on a graffiti artist and a punk singer whose revolutionary ideals collide with the brutal reality of police repression. In Susana, co-directed by Amandine Thomas and Gerardo Coello Escalante, an American woman in Mexico City drifts through a spontaneous night of uncertainty with younger tourists, unraveling in subtle, revelatory ways.
Vincent DeLuca’s U.S.-Mexican documentary Desert Angel follows Rafael Larraenza, a migrant-turned-activist drawn back to the borderlands after decades of building a life in the U.S. In Take Care, a Mexico-Spain co-production by Brenton Oechsle, a devoted son tends to his elderly mother with late-stage Alzheimer’s. And Cecilia Andalón Delgadillo’s animated short Dolores plunges a young girl into a surreal underworld where death and imagination blur.
Colombia is represented in Roads of Fire by Nathaniel Lezra, a U.S. co-production exploring the human cost of the global migrant-smuggling economy. From Brazil comes 47 by Paulo Garcia, a stop-motion animated short—created by and for the Down syndrome community—that celebrates resilience and inclusion, with animation by Oscar-winner Matias Liebrecht.
Several U.S. Latinx titles also stand out. Difference & Repetition, 2020 by Mav Block follows an Argentine woman who flees New York with her Peruvian husband at the onset of the pandemic, retreating to his family’s empty beach house near Lima. An unplanned pregnancy sets off the unraveling of their marriage. In the present, she dissects and reframes these memories, attempting to make sense of her loneliness and the altered perception of time that has since defined her life.
In Domestic Animals, Cuban-American filmmaker Juan Pablo Daranas Molina examines the fraying dynamics of friendship during a weekend getaway. On the brink of their thirties, five longtime friends reunite for a farewell getaway, but their idyllic retreat turns sour when they lose their beloved dogs in the woods. A Lien, a gripping short by Sam & David Cutler-Kreutz, dramatizes the chaos of an undocumented family facing sudden deportation.
Together, these films offer a compelling snapshot of contemporary Latinx and Latin American cinema—stories that challenge, comfort, and illuminate. For screening times and tickets, visit the Brooklyn Film Festival website.
