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“The Florida Project” excelled at showing how a child’s imagination can provide the mental armor necessary to endure impoverished circumstances, but it never had a monopoly on the concept. “Los Lobos,” the bittersweet new feature from director Samuel Kishi, plays like a thematic variation on the same beguiling premise in the context of the American immigrant experience. The result is .

That means eight-year-old Max (Maximiliano Nájar Márquez) and five-year-old Leo (Leonardo Nájar Márquez) guide the story through a series of drab environments using the only tools at their disposal. Promised by single mom Lucía (Martha Reyes Arias) that their move from Mexico to Albuquerque will result in a trip to Disneyland, they instead find themselves locked in a squalid apartment all day while she juggles a pair of low-income jobs. The line she feeds her Spanish-speaking children to get them hyped — “I want to go Disney!” — embodies the tragicomic...

An already moving film is given an unforeseen blush of relevance in these trying times by refracting an immigration story through the prism of a childhood experience of forced isolation. In Samuel Kishi Leopo’s tender and sincere “Los Lobos,” it is not a virus but poverty, uncertain legal status and stranger danger that makes the world outside the little family’s dingy apartment into a perilous place. Still, the rhythms of quarantine are painfully recognizable — the bursts of creativity followed by long stretches of boredom, the closeness and the squabbling, the intense yearning to be out in the world, nose pressed against the window pane.

For Max and Leo (two superbly natural performances from real-life brothers Maximiliano and Leonardo Najar Marquez), the loneliness is exacerbated because of the strangeness of this new country, with only the far-off promise of a trip to “Disney” to look forward to. Brought across...

FiGa Films has shared the first trailer for Animal de Luz production “Los Lobos,” the second feature from Mexican director Samuel Kishi Leopo, set to play in Berlinale’s GenerationKplus.

Previously the film won the Signis award at the Havana Film Festival and passed through various international festivals such as Korea’s Busan International Film Festival and China’s Hainan Film Festival.

A co-production between Cebolla Films and Valebrije Producciones, the film dives into the harsh realities facing a Mexican single mother, played by Martha Reyes Arias, as she and her two kids arrive in Albuquerque, New Mexico with hopes of a better life.

Following up the four-time Mexican Academy Ariel Award-nominated “We Are Mari Pepa,” Leopo’s debut feature, the Mexican director explores with an unflinching eye the stark reality of immigration through the gaze of two brothers Max and Leo, played by Maxilimiliano and Leonardo Najar Marquez, locked...