‘Nueba Yol’ Boosts Hopes for Reviving Latino Cinema

“Nueba Yol,” a tiny film from the Dominican Republic that translates as “New York” in pidgin Spanish, has drawn crowds that belie its humble origins.

Shot for about $300,000, the Spanish-language film has brought in more than $2.7 million since it opened on the East Coast Feb. 17. In fact, when the film opened in a 14-screen multiplex in New York over the Presidents Day weekend, it out-grossed every American film (including “Broken Arrow,” “Dead Man Walking,” “City Hall” and “Muppet Treasure Island”) playing there. More important, the film--which plays primarily to Spanish-speaking audiences--is viewed by some as the first successful attempt to revive the dormant Populist Latino cinema.

“When we talk about popular Latino cinema, we’re talking about films that had their roots in the old Mexican cinema, films that were made for the masses,” says Lawrence Martin, one of the film’s producers and a third-generation veteran of the Spanish-language exhibition community. “Yet since the mid-1980s, that kind of cinema has declined to the point where it’s now basically nonexistent.”

Martin, who was running a chain of 20 Spanish-language theaters in Northern California, was hard hit by the shortage. He ended up selling off most of the theaters simply because there wasn’t enough product. “This was a chain of theaters built by my great-uncle who emigrated to the U.S. from Spain,” he says. “It was handed down to my father and then to me.” He says that at one time there were 750 theaters in the United States that showed nothing but Spanish-language cinema. “There are a few still left, but they show American films, some that have been subtitled.”

The decline in Populist Latino films occurred for a number of reasons--the drastic drop in the peso, the rise of television and a general shift toward making films that were either art-house fare (“Like Water for Chocolate”) or straight-to-video exploitation fare.

“In addition, the long-term nature of the Mexican industry has been consistently set up to encourage one-time investments,” says Chon Noriega, an assistant professor in the UCLA department of film and television. “Investors are thus looking for immediate payoffs rather than investments in the country’s film industry. All of this made the Mexican film industry shaky.”

Television has possibly taken the biggest chunk out of the exhibition business. Noriega says that by the mid-1970s, almost half of the films being made in Mexico were made for television.

Enter Angel Mun~iz, a TV writer, producer and director in the Dominican Republic, who wrote, directed and produced “Nueba Yol.” After a chance meeting with Luisito Marti, a well-known TV comedy actor in the Dominican Republic, the two agreed to make a film together using one of the popular comedy characters Marti had created.

That character is Balbuena, a hapless but endearing fellow who dreams of immigrating to the United States, a land where he’s told that people harvest dollars like heads of lettuce. In the film, he mortgages his house to pay for a visa to New York but soon finds that his dreams are far from reality.

Martin, who had all but given up on the exhibition business, joined with American film distributor Kit Parker (whose company mostly distributes classic films, including “My Fair Lady” and “Rebel Without a Cause”), and they both decided to get in on Mun~iz’s project at the ground level--Martin as a producer and Parker as a distributor.

Most of the funding came from private Dominican sources. “I had talked to many filmmakers about resurrecting this genre of cinema, but always came up empty-handed,” Martin says. “I really believed then and still do that there is a huge Spanish-speaking audience out there that is starved for this kind of fare. When I met Angel, I knew he was a filmmaker with whom I could work.”

“Nueba Yol,” which has played in New York, Boston, Miami and Washington, opens in Los Angeles Friday in about 15 theaters--the long delay blamed on a lack of theater space. “This was one of the most crowded summers ever in terms of film releases,” Parker says. “There were no screens available at the start of summer. Then, as it turned out, the summer fell apart and screens became available. But by then, there wouldn’t have been enough time to promote it.”

In addition, the video will be released in November, selling for $19.95, a move that Parker says he is unhappy about. “I would never have put the video out this soon,” he says. “It was done by the Dominican producers. And yet, we’ve gotten such a demand to release the film in L.A., we’re going ahead with it.”

Still, it remains to be seen whether Mexican American audiences will flock to the film, since the film centers on the plight of a Dominican on the East Coast.

“Here, the Latino culture consists mainly of Mexican through Central American,” Noriega says. “While in New York, the Spanish culture is predominantly Caribbean. And their immigrant problems are much different. For one thing, Puerto Ricans are already U.S. citizens, and Cubans have political exile.”

Martin agrees that the immigrant experience sharply differs on each coast but says the story is nonetheless a universal one speaking to an immigrant’s situation. “We’ve been experimenting with the release of this picture in each market we’ve gone into,” he says. Ad strategies have changed from city to city, first touting it as a Dominican triumph, then as a Latino triumph in other markets where Dominican populations are not prevalent.

“There is a substantial Mexican influence in the film, but if I had made the film, I would have introduced more,” Martin says. “But we look at this film as our first baby step into reinvigorating this market. Ironically, I first got involved in this to provide pictures for my theaters. Now I’ve gotten rid of my theaters and I’m seeing the film industry from a whole new side.”