Nuyorican Dream

A Nuyorican is a Puerto Rican living in New York, and by the time we are finished with filmmaker Laurie Collyer's five year cinema vérité study, we have come to realize that the Nuyorican dream often ends as a nightmare. Nuyorican Dream follows the lives of the Torres family, who live together in a cramped Brooklyn apartment: Robert, a gay schoolteacher, big hearted and sensitive, who is the only member of the family to graduate from high school; Danny, his brother, in and out of prison on assault charges; sister Betty, a heroin and crack addict who robs old men for their spare change and churns out children as fast as she can abandon them for the next high; and Marta, their single mother, age 45, who sells clothes on the street and does whatever she can to keep her family alive. The Torres family members laugh and love and cry and rob and steal and fight and cheat each other out of life in a dizzying and ultimately depressing study that leaves the viewer with an alarming vision of what goes on behind closed doors in the American ghetto. While the film's assertion that American colonialism in Puerto Rico and bad school systems for Latinos are solely to blame is arguable, there can be no doubt that, in these times of high flying prosperity, there are some un-nourished people down in the dry depths of desperation where no trickle down economics will ever reach. In a haunting glimpse of a possible future, the most touching and tragic moments come from the thoughts and dreams of the innocent children in this family whose lives have yet to be tainted by poverty, desperation and drugs. Highly recommended. Aud: C, P. (R. Ray)