By My Side (A Mi Lado)

Filmmaker Jean-Cosme Delaloye follows the seemingly no-hope lives of one impoverished family in Nicaragua, who subsist primarily by rag-picking in the Chureca, a notorious garbage-dump outside Managua that is the largest open-air landfill in Central America, where the wretched are gathered around in shanty ghettoes. Several interviewees are women from a family who once dwelled in a ruined roofless cinema; now they seem stuck in a downward spiral that they trace to being abandoned by their mother. Glue-sniffing addict Dominga is HIV-positive and regarded as a "prostitute" by a scornful nephew after she slept with her stepfather (men in general are unseen and dismissed as abusive, alcoholic louts). Maryuri, 19 and pregnant for the second time, shows early signs of health problems from the toxic environment. Fabiola, only 11 and unsullied, is succored by a faith-based Managua charity that tries to rescue kids from the Chureca, but she requires her mother's benevolence if she is to be saved (and there's little chance of that). Delaloye's direction occasionally lapses into kitschy-gauzy stylistic touches reminiscent of telenovela soap operas—even though the people here are tragically real—but overall this is a disturbing, melancholic look at one family struggling to survive in the face of considerable socioeconomic obstacles. Recommended. Aud: C, P. (C. Cassady)