Latin America

The notion of a young American directing a film shot in Mexico and performed in Spanish by Latin American actors prompts thoughts not only of exploitation but also of third-world voyeurism. Yet Cary Joji Fukunaga's debut feature film Sin Nombre ("without name" in Spanish) is an authentic story of Casper, a teenage member of a vicious street gang, and Sayra, a Honduran teenage who is riding on top of a train to Texas.

Fukunaga travelled around Mexico to research Sin Nombre and the film is a fascinating glimpse into South American mobsters and the endless lure of North America. At the same time, however, Sin Nombre takes its narrative arc - in which violence is followed by redemption - straight from Hollywood.

It's a shame while the US has always dominated movie culture, the films made right across its southern border (notably in Mexico, Brazil and Argentina) can be far more exciting, challenging and less formulaic. Latin American film directors have often made political films to support the cultural revolution: 1964's I Am Cuba, a visually seductive pro-Castro film, is one of the most famous while last year's Birdwatchers is a plea for justice.

In Birdwatchers, Marco Bechis follows a group of Guarani-Kaiowa (an indigenous group living in the Mato Grosso do Sul state of Brazil) as they attempt to reclaim their land from a local plantation farmer. The fact that Bechis was born in Chile and raised in both Buenos Aires and Sao Paulo before moving to Italy in the late 70s allows him an intimate outsider's eye.

Walter Salles has a similarly nomadic background. He was born in Rio de Janeiro and raised in France and the US before returning to Brazil. He spearheaded the return of Brazilian cinema to international prominence in the late 90s with Central Station, a road movie in which a young boy charms a callous aging woman into finding his father. Then, in 2003, he made the hugely ambitious Motorcycle Diaries, in which Gael Garcia Bernal plays Ernesto "Che" Guevara as a 23-year-old medical student who sets out form Buenos Aires to explore South America.

Latin American films are as diverse as those made in Europe - 1959's Black Orpheus recreated the Orpheus legend in Rio with an all-black cast while 2004's Bombon El Perro is a neo-realist fable set in bleak Patagonia landscape about an unemployed man on the brink of despair and a pedigree dog who brings him luck - and as such are worth exploring when a Hollywood blockbuster just isn't challenging enough.