Of the two dozen–plus feature films coming to this year’s Vancouver Latin American Film Festival, Christian Sida-Valenzuela’s personal favourite opens with what you might call softcore tentacle porn. From that eye-popping intro, The Untamed only gets more darkly and artfully transgressive. How often does Sida-Valenzuela get to indulge his more outré tastes in this way?

“Not as often as I would like,” answers the artistic director, with a chuckle. “’Cause I really want to take care of the audience.” Case in point, he adds, is the charming Gael García Bernal comedy You’re Killing Me Susana, which Sida-Valenzuela confidently expects will emerge as this year’s most popular title. “They come,” he says, “not strictly from our curatorial point of view, but learning through Vancouver audiences what they have liked in the past.”

Indeed, it’s precisely this kind of close attention to viewer taste that brings us to the increasingly popular festival’s 15th year. Assembled by Sida-Valenzuela and his partners on the six-member committee, VLAFF once again offers a program that’s long on both crowd-pleasers and smartly curated art-house and festival favourites from the region.

If you’ve missed, for instance, recent raves like Pablo Larrain’s mischievous biography of Chilean poet Pablo Neruda or Sônia Braga’s acclaimed twilight performance in the Brazilian film Aquarius, VLAFF’s got you covered. The rest of the fest is rife with titles—many from its killer new directors series, most getting their Vancouver premiere—that are likely to win the same kind of international attention. Among these: the Chilean Bad Influence, a coming-of-age tale set inside the fractious grey zone where city life meets Indigeneity, and director Nele Wohlatz’s formally daring tale of young Chinese immigrants in Argentina, The Future Perfect.

With Cuba as this year’s guest country, Sida-Valenzuela took the liberty of adding one of his favourite movies to the schedule with Tomás Gutiérrez Alea’s 1968 hit Memories of Underdevelopment. Carlos Lechuga’s ’80s-set Santa & Andrés closes VLAFF, meanwhile, with a pointed critique of the Castro era, featuring a gay central character placed under house arrest by the intolerant regime. Remarkably, the film was banned by the Cuban Film Institute and removed from a New York–based festival at the insistence of the Cuban minister of culture.

“We are strongly LGBT,” states Sida-Valenzuela, who divides his time between Canada and his native Mexico. “I’ve been here for many years and it’s easy to forget that the rest of the world is not as open as Vancouver. In Mexico or other countries in Latin America, this film would be very provocative. We really like to show this other face of Latin America. It’s a very complex region, very big, very diverse—this is another part.”

The fest’s progressive streak is most in evidence in its annual ¡Activismo! series, focused this year on women’s issues with titles like Tatiana Huezo’s hauntingly poetic account of human trafficking, Tempestad, and the documentary Dolores, about United Farm Workers firebrand Dolores Huerta. And there’s a winning universality baked into something like Panamerican Machinery, a Buñuelian satire from Mexico that takes on the decline of industry and the erosion of labour protection. Ditto the vicious São Paulo housing crisis depicted in The Hotel Cambridge. Now there’s a theme that’s going to have some resonance for anyone living here.

“This is a film that addresses an issue that Vancouver faces every day,” says Sida-Valenzuela. “It’s hard, because Latin America can be very far from Vancouver culturewise, but we do try to find those films that have a link to local audiences.”

Even our small and too often ignored community of tentacle fetishists would have to agree.

The Vancouver Latin American Film Festival runs at various venues from August 24 to September 3. More information is at the Vancouver Latin Film Festival website.