Mamitas – 2011 LAFF

Mamitas ended up being the last movie on my docket at the Los Angeles Film Festival. And after over a week of mostly fantastic films in the lineup, writer/director Nicholas Ozeki’s film about a troubled Mexican-American youth and his burgeoning relationship with an unlikely classmate would be tasked with living up to some high expectations simply due to it being the film most recently on my mind when recalling how good the festival was.

Suffice it to say that I’ll only have glowing reviews of the overall experience because Mamitas didn’t disappoint. In fact, it did everything right when it comes to an independent film, shot in Los Angeles, about kids living in Los Angeles, debuting at the Los Angeles Film Festival. Funny enough, it was also probably the most Hollywood-ready film (aside from Drive which is itself a Hollywood film) that I’d seen there, with its high production values, excellent acting, and traditional narrative.

Shot on Super 16 film over a period of 27 days (with an undisclosed yet likely decently sized budget), Ozeki put a stellar cast and tight script on-screen based on a short that he made in grad school: a refreshing tale about Hispanic youths in lower-income areas of Los Angeles told with incredible honesty and realism. Sure, the ending got rather schmaltzy with Ozeki feeling the need to wrap up every single loose end in a nice bow (probably why it ended up feeling so ready for Tinseltown), but everything else – and everyone else – leading up to it felt organic and three-dimensional enough to earn that type of finale. And that made it all that more surprising to find out afterward that Ozeki had no real experience with the Hispanic community other than what he gleaned from having moved to Anaheim after college. During the Q-and-A, a man asked Ozeki if he had gotten the idea from a book or someone he knew. But, no. It was just all from his imagination, putting together the spot-on dialogue from studying people in his own neighborhood – aided by the Hispanic actors doing their own tweaking to some of the lines to maintain authenticity.

All of that created a world that felt extremely real for being one of which Ozeki didn’t have intimate knowledge. But the basic themes of identity and adolescent love aren’t exactly unique only to the Hispanic community, making it less of a stretch for it all to work as well as it does. Throw in two actors as talented as E.J. Bonilla and Veronica Diaz-Carranza, and we’ll go along with just about anything that ends up on the screen. Likely, we’ll be watching Mamitas hit art theaters in the near future, and I highly recommend seeing it: a heartwarming tale that refreshingly looks upon the world with a positive eye.