El Callejón de los Milagros

"The Alley of Miracles" (also called "Midaq Alley" in English) is a film that inhabits a neighborhood at the heart of Mexico City. The lives of the neighbors intertwine, and the film shifts its points of view four times to show the neighborhood from the perspective of different characters: Don Ru, the owner of a cantina who late in life is awakened to homosexual inclinations; Almita, a beautiful young woman who is coming of age, and her novio, Abel, a young and earnest barber who migrates to the U.S. with the hope of earning enough money to return to México and marry her; and Susana, the spinster landlady who is waiting for her Prince Charming to arrive. Their world - this tight and chaotic neighbhoorhood at the center of a sprawling metropolis - is strained in many directions by poverty, disillusionment, love, hope, passion, despair - the spectrum of human motions. Each character is complex, and the shifting point of view of the film challenges the empathy of the viewer. The 1995 film is the most award-winning Mexican film, and, as the professor of the "Cine y Literatura" class claims, it is one of the best.

And it is very Mexican - the scenes of men playing dominoes in the cantina; the crush of people of all different social strata in the streets; the sights of Mexico City plazas. What is fascinating and ironic is that the film was adapted from a novel set in Cairo by the Egyptian writer Naguib Mahfouz.