Erasing Boundaries With ‘Foto-Novelas’

PBS would be nearly all safety nets and no risks were it not for the Independent Television Service, a San Francisco-based programming resource that freshens public broadcasting with an occasional brisk breeze of feistiness.

With risks inevitably come stumbles, however, as in the case of “Foto-Novelas,” a series of four slender ITVS films meant to erase the boundaries between reality and fantasy along the lines of some of the comic book-like pulp novels of Latino and Chicano tradition.

The four-part series begins promisingly tonight with “Seeing Through Walls,” Carlos Avila’s futuristic story set in a California prison, where wrongly convicted inmate Gabriel Pen~a (John Verea) has his brain implanted with a microchip that gives him stunning knowledge as part of a scientific experiment.

The ordinary man as a lab specimen, made brilliant through science, is hardly original. The theme is expanded interestingly, though, when Pen~a is forced to choose between freedom and his newly acquired learning, an intriguing crossroads that Avila unfortunately zooms by without a pit stop en route to a disappointing, stock ending.

Even more modest is the third-part fable, “Mangas,” directed by A.P. Gonzalez and written by Edit Villarreal and Bennett Cohen. It merges reality with the dream world of a 7-year-old Costa Rican orphan (Ulysses Cuadra) who has been adopted by an American couple and brought to the United States, his fantasies generated by a longing for home and an awkward adjustment to his new surroundings.

Who wouldn’t welcome seeing a rain forest in his room, at least occasionally? Yet this story is as slight as it is tender, and ultimately is doomed by another pat, fix-all wrap-up and acting that at times is amateurish.

* “Foto-Novelas” airs tonight and three subsequent Wednesdays at 10:30 p.m. on KCET-TV Channel 28.