Like Water for Chocolate

  I believe that this entire film is about love.  It is about the belief that love can conquer all.  It can defeat traditions, enemies, even wars.  The film depicts a doomed love that cannot be; however, the film uses magic realism to show that love can change the world and alter reality. The power of love and food combine to change destinies.  This is a trick though.  Magic realism does not alter reality, just the mind of the viewer.  Throughout the movie, it appears that the two are growing closer together.  However, at the end, they are still doomed.  Magic realism has no true power over reality, it only affects the mind.  Despite this, I still believe that the message of the film is that love can conquer all.

Machuca

  In Machuca, Gonzalo and Pedro form an unlikely friendship.  Gonzalo comes from a very wealthy family and Pedro comes from a very poor one.  Gonzalo is very pale, which generally means respect, and Pedro is fairly dark.  When the communist government takes over Chile, the boys are put into a private school together.  They soon become friends and spend a lot of time together.  The boys go to different political rallies and sell flags to all the different sects.  The message that can be inferred from this film is the belief that true love and friendship do not take into account skin color or class.  It is that those things are superficial and do not truly matter.

Volver

 The film Volver is a display of women's resilience because all of the female characters in the film endure some horrible tragedy.  Whether it is an attempted rape, a loved one being unfaithful, or a life-threatening illness, not one woman excapes life's most horrendous trials.  Even though the women are faced with such difficulties, they all overcome the obstacles and grow as a result of them.  In fact, some of the female characters become better off as an indirect result of their experiences.  The main character, played by Penelope Cruz, because of her husband's death, becomes the owner of a extremely busy restaurant.  When Peneolope's mother is revealed to not be dead, or possibly a ghost, the entire family bonds together.  As the film progresses, the viewers learn of more trials that the family has endured.  Despite all of these, the family stays strong and continues to grow stronger.

Entre Nos

  In the film Entre Nos, Mariana is a mother of two children, living in the United States with her husband.  She states that she left Colombia becuase he wanted to.  They are living a fairly comfortable life with friends and enough to get by.  Soon her husband says that he wants to leave for Miami because he has found better work there.  He stops calling, however, and soon it is revealed that he does not intend for his family to reunite with him. 
  Mariana and her two children find themselves in a desperate situation.  She has no job and can barely speak English.  They begin to gather pop cans out of garbage cans to get enough money to eat and are soon kicked out of their apartments.  This affects Mariana immensly because suddenly she has become the bread-winner for her family.  While she had very important responsibilities anyway, she now has all of them for family.  She must take the place of the father and the mother in her family. 
  Being in this situation forces Mariana and her children to become more courageous and self-relient.  It also fuels their love for one another.  This is similar to situations faced by many single mothers, in any nation.  It was obviously an extremely difficult situation but it also brought them much closer together and increased their appriciation for each other.

The Official Story

  In the Official Story, the main character is confronted with a serious dilema.  She is unable to bear children so her husband brings home a young girl one day for them to adopt.  She does not question where the young girl came from until one day an old friend of hers returns and describes being tortured and witnessing mother's children being taken away for political crimes.  She begins to consider that maybe her daughter is one of these lost childern.  As she searches for the answers and truth about her daughter, she starts to experience changes in her own life.  It would be an extremely difficult journey to have to find out who the real relatives of your child are.
  I believe that the mother will be able to reconcile with herself because she becomes open to the new family after some time and invites the grandmother into her home.  She eventually even leaves her own husband to pursue this journey.  Because she is willing to leave her world behind for the sake of her daughter, I know that she is able to grow and adapt to this new addition to her life.