The lucky 13th annual San Diego Latino Film Festival returns to town for 11 days March 9-19 at UltraStar’s Hazard Center in Mission Valley. What began as a student festival has grown to become one of our city’s most dependable venues for world cinema.

Incorporated into this year’s burgeoning lineup of over 100 films is the Cine Gay series, documenting GLBT life around the globe, which will showcase six award-winning features, five shorts and the local premiere of the film Altared Lives.

Although no stranger to screening numerous GLBT films throughout the years, this is the first time the festival has sanctioned an entire series. Altared Lives is a preaching-to-the-choir documentary that brought 10 young GLBT adults together for 15 weeks to shoot, edit and produce a video documentary about religion, family, culture and sexuality in San Diego and Tijuana.

Altared Lives is the first film produced under the Color Lens Project banner from the Media Arts Center San Diego’s Teen Producers Project. The talking-head affidavits are sincere, but I could have done with less unimaginative “face of God” bridging shots. Isn’t there a better way to visually represent spirituality than done-to-death images of cloud formations and prettified sunsets? At least they didn’t back them up with Thus Spoke Zarathustra. The 27-minute film ends with a list of local churches that are GLBT friendly. The film screens on Saturday, March 18, at 1:00 p.m.

Other films in the series include El Che de los Gays, Maricones, Muxes, Cazuza and Seres Extravagantes. Tickets range from $6.50 to $8.50 for film screenings, $10 to $25 for concerts and galas.

For complete information and a festival schedule, visit the San Diego Latino Film Festival Web site at www.sdlatinofilm.com or call (619) 230-1938.

Written and directed by Edgardo Cozarinsky

Starring: Gonzalo Heredia, Diego Trerotola, Gregory Dayton and Mariana Anghileri

81 minutes

Even though this film takes place during All Soul’s night, the eve of Dios de los Muertos, do not confuse it with the recent, identically-named Russian horror film. Then again, we do spend an evening watching vampire-like child of the night Victor (Gael Garcia Bernal replica Gonzalo Heredia) rent his body and sell drugs on the streets of Buenos Aires. The film begins as a shimmering journey through Argentina’s underbelly and manages to retain its visual brilliance long after the story takes a wrong turn in the direction of delusional paranoia.

Initially, Victor’s life is so charmed that it begins to play like a recruitment film for taxi boys. Be your own boss, set your own hours and have sex while on company time! Sell a few bags of coke on the side to pay the rent and what more could you ask for? Victor has a regular clientele, among them the local police inspector. While Bogart and Cagney had to kick back money to keep officers off their tails, the only thing this cop wants in return for protection is Victor’s tail.

Even sordid street dealings favor mirth and whimsy over danger and despair: Fassbinder on lithium. We’re uncertain whether the bear following Victor represents a trick or a threat. He catches up with him in a bathroom where Victor, posing alluringly in a stall, wets his lips and reaches into his pants for some rock-hard entertainment. The only thing to emerge from his jeans is a bag of rocks, and when the corpulent addict leans in for a kiss, Victor wriggles away warning, “That’s not included in the price.” Fans of eye-candy certainly won’t leave unhappy, particularly after a steamy mutual-masturbation scene.

The film is obviously influenced by Martin Scorsese and David Lynch, both masters in the art of merging the unmergeable – realism and expressionism. Cozarinsky shows a skilled hand at sensual atmospherics, and his attempts to add a documentary feel frequently pay off. Five minutes in and I had already counted one homeless guy and two busloads of background characters staring directly into the camera (a tribute to Paul Simon in Annie Hall?), but this soon subsided.

It is when Cozarinsky attempts to inject drama through surrealism that the film begins to unravel. Suddenly, women are pushing their lovers into traffic and/or behind the wheel trying to run Victor down. The only logical reason behind his paranoid lapse is hinted at during a dinner with a friend so unskilled with chopsticks that a sympathetic waitress brings him a fork. He suggests that one of Victor’s former regulars has contracted “that.”

Not surprisingly, the film just ends. But for two-thirds of its journey, Ronda Nocturna comes highly recommended. Gonzalo Heredia is scheduled to appear in person at the March 12 screening.

Ronda Nocturna screens Sunday, March 12, at 7:30 p.m.; Thursday, March 16, at 5:00 p.m. and Sunday, March 19, at 10:00 p.m.

Directed by Fernando Eimbcke

Written by Fernando Eimbcke and Paula Markovitch

Starring: Enrique Arreola, Diego Catano, Daniel Miranda and Danny Perea

90 minutes in black and white

The premise of Duck Season represents both adolescent ecstasy and ersatz neo-realism: With mom off at work and an apartment all to themselves, how do two 14-year-old best friends, Flama (Daniel Miranda) and Moko (Diego Catano), spend a lazy Sunday morning together? Leaning closer to “Seinfeld” than Rossellini, the film turns out to be a cute comedy about nothing.

Clearing their agenda of everything but videogames and junk food, the boys can’t wait to get down to the business of fun. I don’t recall if it took longer for the overly protective mom to vamoose or the countless coffee-table-book establishing shots to dwindle. Instead of focusing on the kids alone, the filmmakers felt the need to include one adult semi-authority figure, a delivery man named Ulises (Enrique Arreola). The boys pull out a stopwatch and call Telepizza, the Mexico City equivalent of Domino’s. Get with the program. Even late-night load Jay Leno put a moratorium on “pizza in 30 minutes” jokes.

Arriving just seconds late, the boys refuse to fork over any money, and it isn’t long before Ulises makes two new friends and is telling the kids the story of his life. (I could have done without the chapter that included footage of euthanized dogs.) Rounding out the film’s quartet of characters is Rita (Danny Perea), a 16-year-old neighbor girl who needs to borrow their oven to bake a birthday cake.

A film like this is usually as good as the observations it makes, and Duck Season has more than a few behavioral modifications to impart. Did you know that the best way to stop a glass of Coca-Cola from overflowing is to stick your finger in it? Ever roast marshmallows with a kitchen knife and a Bic lighter? And shouldn’t there be at least one Rancid T-shirt in all of our wardrobes?

Shot in black and white (although the color printing process casts a sepia tint), the film too often plays like an ABC After School Special – if the kids were allowed to swear and eat hash brownies. We spend a good chunk of the film watching the gang get high, eat, don shades and giggle. Whenever the narrative logjams, at least we have terrific performances by Miranda and Catano to tap into.

Although not a part of the Cine Gay lineup, of the few films I was able to see in advance, this one has the most honest, unpretentious approach to sex. Would an American film permit a shot of a grown man, standing naked before two adolescent boys, performing a self-baptismal? Even though Rita is eager to test her make-out skills, it is the side-eyed lingering glances between the boys and one brief moment where they hold hands that best represents the blush of first romance.

There is enough loopy charm on display for me to recommend Duck Season. The kids alone make it worth the effort. If the San Diego Latino Film Festival programmers had a sense of humor, they would open the screening with Chuck Jones’ Bugs and Daffy classic Rabbit Fire. In order to make it official, show the DVD with the alternate Spanish-language audio track and English subtitles.

Duck Season screens Saturday, March 18, at 8:00 p.m. and Sunday, March 19, at 5:00 p.m.