INOCENTE – The Review

At 15, Inocente, the subject of this documentary of the same name, looks like a normal American teenager in her brightly colored make-up, festive clothes and paint-spattered shoes but in reality she has been through more trauma than most people many times her age. Although she’s spent most of her life in her hometown of San Diego, she’s an undocumented immigrant, having crossed illegally from Mexico with her parents as a young child. She’s also survived brutal abuse at the hands of her father, talked her mother out of a murder-suicide, and spent nine homeless, moving between shelters, cheap apartments, and the streets with her mother and younger brothers while at same time trying to avoid deportation.

Though they are not truly homeless, as Inocente points out. Homelessness does not mean you are sleeping in an alley or a park, it might just mean that you don’t have a permanent home. Inocente’s family is continually on the move, mostly because they get evicted from the places they stay when Inocente’s mother, an illegal immigrant whose work options are limited, can’t make-up the rent. Living in San Diego, Inocente goes to school with some of the richest kids in the country, but despite all her troubles, Inocente keeps a positive outlook, and focuses on the thing that makes her happiest, her art, and after an art show presents itself as an opportunity to change her life, the film documents the visual genius preparing various works for her art gallery, while opening up about her life as someone who is homeless.

Directed by Oscar-nominated duo Sean and Andrea Fine (WAR/DANCE), INOCENTE is presented by illustrating the array of problems that lead to physical and psychological displacement. The latter is the real subject of the short, since it lies at the core of the familial abuse which haunts Inocente. Her mother was a pregnant teenager when she entered the U.S. illegally; estranged from her violent husband who was deported after an altercation, she now struggles to provide for her family. While it seems that we enter Inocente’s life during a significant turning point, the filmmakers, to their credit, make clear that their subject’s future is far from assured. Too much screen time is devoted to the nonprofit arts organization that fostered Inocente’s talent, but this is a minor flaw in a sensitive portrayal of a teenager who, in order to face the world each day, dons a different mask of her own making.

INOCENTE is a charming documentary that manages to prompt more than a few smiles, and given the tough issues involved that is a surprising approach to the story. Inocente herself, meanwhile, has a bright future ahead of her; the hero of her own story that breaks the bounds of what’s possible as much as any of the fantastic visions that come out of her paint brush. INOCENTE is a wonderful, life affirming story.

4 Out Of 5 Stars

The Documentary Shorts will be opening at Laemmle’s Music Hall 3 in Beverly Hills.