Brazilian cinema is the focus of this year’s edition of the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. Running from today  to September 14, the program features nine titles from South America’s largest nation. (Visit www.vlaff.org/ for schedule, venue, and ticket information.)

“Every year, we look at one country,” explained the fest’s Mexican-born director, Victor Martinez Aja, in a recent meeting with the Georgia Straight. “There are so many good films coming from Brazil right now, and it seemed like a good time to bring them here.”

The selection is a mixed bag, with some efforts plodding through familiar territory while others stretch stylistic boundaries to varied effect. A few things are so regional, it’s hard to imagine outsiders getting the jokes.

One such case is Wood & Stock: Sexo, Orégano e Rock ’n’ Roll, a rare animated feature from Latin America, colourfully lifted from a series of popular comic strips and books by the São Paulo artist Angeli. It centres on the titular characters, shaggy sexagenarians still living in the free-love 1960s.

The Greatest Love of All reunites writer-director Carlos Diegues with his Bye Bye Brazil star, José Wilker, playing a middle-aged physicist who returns to Rio when he discovers he is dying. This understandably dour fellow searches the favelas for both his birth parents and the reason why his adoptive father, a famous conductor played by Marco Ricca, disdained him.

In The Milky Way, Ricca plays a Brazilian lit professor attempting to navigate São Paulo’s impenetrable traffic grid to find out why his girlfriend is dumping him—although an overdose of flashbacks is probably the culprit.

A car crash in Brazil’s biggest city is the unifying feature in Not by Chance, which weaves together stories of people connected by the accident. Querô is about a boy (the impressive Maxwell Nascimento) caught in a spiral of street crime, but its grittily realistic storytelling is undone, again, by needless, heavy-handed flashbacks.

Corruption, cynicism, and getting things done are subjects handled with comic aplomb in Basic Sanitation, in which rural eccentrics (including the great Fernanda Torres) discover that the only way to fix their ailing sewer system is to take money earmarked to make a local film—something they know less than nothing about.

And a few similar elements are treated dramatically in the closing-gala film, Forbidden to Forbid, centring on three idealistic students at a modern university.

“Usually, Brazilian movie characters don’t have much knowledge,” says the potent film’s writer and director, Jorge Durán, reached at his Rio de Janeiro home. “The characters here are actively engaged in the plight of the poor, and in addressing corruption in the system. I’m interested in people who are interested in the world around them.”

Durán uses his locations as a kind of character, giving the viewer vistas of Rio far removed from postcard clichés.

“I’ve been travelling to festivals with this movie for two years now,” he explains in Portuguese, through a translator. “And youths in Mexico and Italy, even in Switzerland, really connected with these characters.”

In a unique position to survey Latin American cinema, Durán was born in Santiago, Chile, in 1942, and worked as an assistant director to Costa-Gavras on State of Siege before fleeing the dictatorship for Brazil. There, he worked for Diegues and other top directors before writing the screenplays for well-known films, including Pixote. Still, this is only his third directing project in almost three decades.

“It’s very irregular here,” he says of the film-support system in Brazil. “You don’t have a constant way up in this country, in terms of funding and all that. But it was very good that [famed musician] Gilberto Gil was the minister of culture for a while. He gave Brazilian movies and music a good visibility abroad.”

Dúran also teaches at a film school in the suburbs of Rio, and his constant contact with younger generations gives him newfound hope.

“Youths today are really interested in making a difference—people who read and think and do things even if they don’t have any money. There’s a lot of freedom here now, with no censorship. If you have a good story and a sensible budget, they give you the grant. There are no worries about the image of Brazil. And there is now an interest in developing the industry itself. So I feel I’m in the right place at the right time.”

Intriguingly, the strongest film is the least Brazilian—at least superficially. Window of the Soul was written and directed by Central Station cinematographer Walter Carvalho and João Jardim, whose newer doc For a Better Day, about the aspirations of urban teens, is also in the fest.

Window of the Soul spends valuable time with filmmakers (Wim Wenders, Agnès Varda), poets (José Saramago), musicians (Hermeto Pascoal), and scientists (Oliver Sacks) around the world, all musing about subtle degrees of blindness and vision. Their acute observations and the film’s lyrical imagery add up to a rare theatrical experience. It’s a movie that makes you look at movies, and more, in a new way.