A tragedy played out in the streets of an unnamed German city by young immigrants from Turkey, Fratricide opens with a dedication to the late Italian filmmaker Pier Paolo Pasolini. It’s appropriate, because Pasolini and Turkish-born filmmaker Yilmaz Arslan share two interests: the lives of rough street kids (the “ragazzi,” in the title of Pasolini’s first novel, Ragazzi di vita), and the use of classical dramatic forms in modern stories. At the film’s center are two Kurdish boys who have been sent to Germany by their families to make their way in the world and to send some money home. Azad (Erdal Celik) officially resides in a state-run orphanage, but spends most of his time on the streets, earning money by cutting hair for Kurds who complain about German barbers. Despising his own older brother, a pimp, he becomes a surrogate brother to Ibo (Xewat Gectan), an innocent 11-year-old sent there by his grandfather after his parents were murdered by Turks. A moderately rude incident with two young Turkish men, sons of a hard-working immigrant, escalates into a blood feud that brings out the worst tribal instincts in both groups, and which shows no signs of ending once the first blood has been shed. If Fratricide, which was awarded the Silver Leopard at the prestigious Locarno Film Festival, is somewhat overheated in its dialogue and crude in its excessive violence (sensitive viewers take note), it is nonetheless a film of considerable power, like Pixote done as a Shakespearean tragedy.

The Emerging Cinema series has brought so many worthy films to the Market Arcade that would otherwise have passed Buffalo by that it can be forgiven the occasional stinker, though it’s a pity that the fourth-rate Red Doors is timed to be onscreen during the holidays. (Then again, maybe it’s just a form of throw-in-the-towel programming on a weekend when so many viewers are likely to check out Hollywood’s Christmas offerings.) Writer-director Georgia Lee cobbles together elements from a decade’s worth of indie clichés around the frame of a Chinese-American family suffering the pains of generational assimilation (a cliché in and of itself). Eldest daughter Sam (Jacqueline Kim) is a successful (though undefined) businesswoman whose engagement to a sterile yuppie stockbroker (Jayce Bartok) founders with the return of her old boyfriend, a sensitive, guitar-playing music teacher (Rossif Sutherland, who looks like a Mad magazine parody of a soulful hunk). Middle daughter Julie (Elaine Kao) is a medical student who finds her true sexuality with a free-spirited actress. Teen Katie (Kathy Shao-Lin Lee) choreographs a hip-hop show for her high school and conducts an unexplained prank war with the boy next door that escalates into the use of explosives. To the extent that any of this underdeveloped fodder makes any sense, it’s because you’ve seen these stories played out so often before. Lee’s clumsiness with tone is almost as big a problem as the skeletal writing: The shifts between black humor and movie-of-the-week melodramatics are continually jarring. Red Doors plays as if Lee was more interested in compiling a series of clips that she could show to Hollywood producers, each of which on its own might indicate that she could handle a particular genre. If that’s the case, she must be presuming that no one would take the time to watch this debut feature all the way through. (And for anyone sniffing that I just don’t appreciate “chick flicks,” let me point out that my wife disliked it even more than I did.)

Putting a face to the issue of illegal immigration that has attracted so much superficial attention in the last year wasn’t what filmmaker Mark Becker had in mind while making Romantico. But then, the final film isn’t what he had planned to make at all. His original goal was a short film about the bachelor culture of Mexican men who worked as mariachi musicians in the Mission Hill district of San Francisco, performing for the patrons of whatever bars and restaurants would let them in the door for tips. It wasn’t until Becker met Carmelo Muniz Sanchez, a 57-year-old musician, that he decided to focus his film on one man. And when Carmelo decided a week after shooting began to return to his hometown of Salvatierra, 1,000 miles south of the US Border, Becker saw the opportunity for a different kind of documentary, one that depicted the struggles of an illegal immigrant in reverse. Carmelo came to the US in the first place to try to earn a decent living for his wife, two teenaged daughters and ailing mother. It is the latter’s worsening condition that sparks Carmelo to make the return trip, though the chance to visit the family he hasn’t seen in three years is just as compelling. Once home, however, he realizes anew all the factors that made him leave in the first place as he struggles to get whatever low paying jobs he can find. Becker filmed Carmelo, a sad-eyed man with a philosophical bent, over a period of three years, though the story has an immediacy as if it takes place in a matter of months. Because he shot on film rather than video, Becker was forced to consider all of his shots carefully, and the result is a work which, while it may lack the plucked-from-real-life nature of many recent documentaries, has a gravity and depth many of those works lack. Becker chose film because he wanted to emulate the look and spirit of such classic 1960s documentaries as D. A. Pennebaker’s Don’t Look Back and the Maysles Brothers’ Salesman. Romantico may not rank at that level of achievement, but neither is the comparison wholly inapt for this moving portrait.