hood film - FilmRoot

Eva (Honduras) – LALIFF 2026

Eva Film Difficulty Ranking: 2

Whilst the drama of Eva is kicked off by tragedy, the film never feels tragic. This is an immensely warm-hearted film which breaks traditional gender roles by casting Endry Cardeño, a trans-woman, as Eva, a grandma forced to take care of her granddaughter. As per the idiom; “it takes a village to raise a child,” we find a small tight-knit community in Tegucigalpa, the largest city in Central America, instead of one of the murder capitals of the world.

From: Honduras, North America
Watch: IMDb
Next: The Awakening of the Ants, Amor y Frijoles, La Yuma

Eva Breakdown

In Eva, a trans-woman takes care of her granddaughter after the sudden death of her daughter-in-law. While processing grief, she tries to help her son connect emotionally to his daughter. Amid tensions, reproaches, and silence, Eva and her son embark on separate paths towards the reconstruction of their family bond and place within their community.

The combination of tragedy and tight-knit family and community make Eva a heart-warming addition to the Central American ‘hood film’ genre. Like the first ‘hood films’ from Los Angeles, such as Boyz n the Hood and Menace II Society, and along the lines of Amor Y Frijoles and La Yuma, Eva centers on the experiences of characters growing up in under-served communities in urban environments. It shows that community bonds are the key to surviving through tragic realities of the city in the face of limited government support. For Eva, there’s no evidence of public support for her adoption of her daughter-in-law. Instead, she builds connections with her in-laws, family, lovers, and customers, to turn the overwhelming city into a warm, mellow community.

It’s also wonderful to see nontraditional gender roles integrated so naturally in Eva. By casting Endry Cardeño as a trans, single grandmother, director William Reyes, normalizes trans people on film, trans people in family roles, and trans people as grandparents (especially pertinent as the life expectancy of trans-women in Tegucigalpa is just 32 according to the director William Reyes).

Look out for Eva‘s release in the coming months to catch a tender, poignant film that centers on family and community navigating tragedy.

Head to our LALIFF 2026 festival Hub for more reviews from LALIFF 2026.

La Yuma – Just a Girl Trying to Make it Out the Hood

La Yuma Film Difficulty Ranking: 2

You’ve probably seen Boyz in the Hood and 8 Mile, and you might have seen Kidulthood and Menace II Society. They’re all ‘hood’ films. Each of them features young men growing up in ‘the hood’, trying to make it despite all the bad influences around them. La Yuma is another ‘hood’ film, but what makes it different is that instead of starring a young man dealing with machismo, gangsters, and bad parents, it stars a young woman dealing with the same things. Introducing our star (and aspiring boxer): La Yuma.

From: Nicaragua, North America
Watch: Trailer, Kanopy, JustWatch
Next: Amor y Frijoles, A Fantastic Woman, Do the Right Thing

Mosh – International Competition – SBIFF

Mosh is an aspiring dancer living in the hood in the Dominican Republic. She lives with her mother who is dying from cancer and her cousin Geronimo, who gets by dealing drugs.

Not sure what to make of it. Mosh starts of as if it’s going to be a musical but then changes direction into a hood film after the opening. It features some of the typical hood film tropes: a kid trying to make it out of the hood, a raw undiscovered talent, relative stuck in a gang. But it also features a few scenes of a tall lady playing God, who’s followed around by a man dressed as a pineapple.

God and her pineapple friend appear to characters to talk about death and nostalgia for a life lived. She helps each of the characters become more comfortable with the idea of death. However, whilst the talks are interesting, they never really fit within the main(?) narrative of the film – that of Mosh and her family (question mark as maybe Mosh isn’t the focus?). The discussions are also pretty long and slow which disrupts the flow of the film further. (Even the characters annoyingly start to interrupt themselves as the discussions about mortality and life starts drifting without focus).

I really wanted to like Mosh, but I could never understand what kind of a film it was trying to be. It has too many moving parts. Instead of focusing on one narrative, it tries to follow many (Mosh, her brother, her mother, the drug boss).

There’s also a lot of unanswered questions. Why does Mosh so vehemently correct anyone who calls her Maria? What is this happiness drug? Why does God keep appearing? Why does she have a side kick dressed as a pineapple? We’re also never clear on why Mosh loves dancing and why she is going to all these dance classes and auditions – is she auditioning for a role? Does she want to make it her career? Is it her way of escaping her reality? It’s never really clear. We just have to assume or accept a lot of things that we are shown.

As a result, we’re never really sure what the film is. The convoluted narrative, varied pace, and unanswered questions make it hard to immerse yourself in the film. We never feel like we know Mosh, but we’re also never sure if this film is actually about her, her brother, the hood, or God.

She Paradise – AFI Fest 2020

Right from the beginning, you can tell that 17 year old Sparkle is lonely. Much like Amy, the lead in Maimouna Doucore’s Cuties, she’s stuck doing house chores for her grandparents. It doesn’t look like she has any friends at school or at work, and she doesn’t talk much. So when she meets a group of older girls dancing in the street, she finds the confidence and expressiveness in them that she wants to have. So she works her way into their clique and transforms from the children’s clothes wearing, shy 17 year old kid from the introduction into a vividly dressed, confident dancer.

Her gateway is Trini culture. In particular Soca music: a mix of calypso, reggae, dancehall unique to Trinidad which permeates She Paradise. Soca is present in the dancing and style, which combines with the music to give Sparkle a brand new modern key to her independence. Embracing the contemporary Trini culture through Soca opens up a new world that is totally unique to her world at home with her grandfather. It’s modern and fresh, instead of from the past. It allows her to forget about her childhood and home poverty, and have an opportunity to become a free independent woman.

She Paradise is a feature length version of the brilliant short film that debuted last year at a few festivals that we reviewed here. Like the short, the feature version has many of the same scenes, which are mostly included in the first part of the film. The feature also contains a few hints at Sparkle’s background, but it’s still not clear what she does before she meets the Soca crew. However, unlike the short, this feature film adds in a few male characters which take the focus away from the female friendship of the short. Instead, the focus switches more to Sparkle and how she navigates a world of patriarchy – represented by her father and Skinny, the male Soca artist. It’s a shame as the friendship between Sparkle and Mica was the highlight of the short.

Head to our AFI Fest Hub for more reviews and short films from AFI Fest 2020.

Zinder (Niger) – CPH: DOX Film Festival 2021

In the city of Zinder, Niger, in the heart of the Sahel, young people form gangs to deal with the lack of work and prospects. These groups called “Palais” come from the Kara Kara district, historically home to lepers and outcasts. Zinder-born director and activist Aicha Macky returns to her hometown to tell the story of this disenfranchised youth. She talks with these men, whose bodies and the territory in which they live are scarred by the violence that has passed through them – a pervasive violence – the roots of which go back to the time of colonisation.

Zinder focuses on Siniya Boy, a member of the “Palais Hitler”, who wants to set up a security company with his fellow bodybuilders; and Bawa, a former Palais leader who turned taxi driver, haunted by memories of the atrocities committed. They live off black market petrol, smuggled from the Nigerian border.

The first scene is intended to shock the western viewer. It’s not everyday you see black men flying Hitler’s name surrounded by swastikas. That’s exactly what the “Palais Hitler” gang does, however not for the reasons we’d expect. They ‘heard he was an invincible warrior from America,’ which if it were true would make him a pretty good choice for weightlifting gang’s mascot. The director doesn’t correct them on their oversight. Just as viewers from outside of Africa probably don’t know much about Niger, it’s weirdly refreshing to find out that these Nigeriens don’t know much about U.S/European history and aren’t stuck on the U.S./European news cycle.

They’re definitely not perfect people. The taxi driver recounts his memories along the lines of the Indonesian genocide perpetrators in The Look of Silence. He speaks of the terrible crimes he committed and the young girls he and his gang raped. However, they’re also portrayed reformatively in the present. In this sense, the characters are a bit more like the life imprisoned inmates in The Prison Within. We see them for the crimes they committed as well as the reformed person they are now. By entering their feared neighborhood and giving them space to talk, Aicha Macky humanizes them.

In the present, they’re still being imprisoned, but imprisoned for their identity: both their past life and where they come from. They’re labeled as criminals because they’re from the Kara Kara neighborhood. The scars they carry from their previous lives only help the police and others to mark them. They inhibit their ability to get medical treatment, move across the city in taxis, and find work. Just because they were born in a rough neighborhood.

The personal tone of the documentary shows the failure of society to recognize them as anything but criminals. Their fierce reputation conflicts with how the director portrays them. Through the unrestricted access to their stories, we see that they’re just regular people forming ‘gangs’ for community and friendship. They seem warm and eager to talk and tell their story. We don’t see any fights or violence on screen, just many close up scars from the past. The only current proof of crime are the palais members currently in jail, but even this is up for debate as they argue they’ve been rounded up for past crimes.

Aicha Macky’s Zinder is an intimate tribute to the youth of her country. It offers a hopeful portrayal of those marked by the neighborhood they were born into.