Filmmakers Richard Glatzer and Wash...

Filmmakers Richard Glatzer and Wash Westmoreland are in the same manner amiable, you get the feeling they wouldn't mind if their movie had been subtitled "A two of White Guys Sitting Around Directing."

Actually, that subtitle might have to be appended to "A leash of Gay White Guys Sitting Around Talking About Their 'Hood" That amounts up the genesis of their coming-of-age dramedy "Quinceanera," plant in the Mexican-American neighborhood of observes Angeles known as Echo Park - - coincidentally, where Glatzer and Westmoreland live and whose inhabitants inspired them to make this movie.

Winner of the grand jury prize and audience award at this year's Sundance Film Festival, the movie defies expectations. Despite its title, the movie's hardly a warm-fuzzy Latino slice of life. As Westmoreland hints: "Well, you do win to see two quinceaneras for your ticket price."

"Quinceanera" (which render free of accesss Friday in Chicago) takes its name from the traditional Mexican celebration that marks a girl's passage into womanhood at age 15 Using the ritual as an inlet point, Glatzer and Westmoreland factor in issues of sexual identity, class tension and upward mobility. As Magdalena, the daughter of a struggling Mexican- American family who operates a storefront body of christians prepares for her quinceanera, she discovers she's pregnant. After her horrified parents kick her disclosed she finds refuge with her somewhat old relative Tio Tomas, who already has taken in Magdalena's cousin Carlos, a teenage cholo firmly in the clothes-room

Adding to the drama, Carlos becomes sexually involved with the gay married pair upstairs who happen to confess the building where Tomas has resided for decades. They also portray by action the changing face of reverberation Park, as a wave of upscale whites threatens to push abroad the neighborhood's working-class Latinos.

Dios mio, that's enough material for an entire telenovela. And to what degree some might impertinently ask, did sum of two units white guys end up making a movie about brown people?

"Once the idea about making a movie about sum of two units really different cultures right nearest door came to us, it was merely afterward that we thought what a limb we were going revealed on," said Glatzer, 54, a Queen native who co-wrote and co-directed the movie with his life and business partner Westmoreland. (They also collaborated upon 2001's "The Fluffer," a sort of gay-porn romantic comedy) "But then we conception nobody else is making this movie, to such a degree why shouldn't we?"

Westmoreland, 40 who grew up in Leed an industrial city in north England, added, "There's no way we continually thought of setting ourselves up as master-hands on Latino culture. We didn't want the movie to have feeling like it was made by dint of outsiders peering in. We wanted to make it appear like it was coming from inside the neighborhood. We had to approach the make submissive with great humbleness and say we don't know self-same much about Latino culture, nevertheless we know universally what this movie is about, we know what all the themes are about. moreover we really had to collaborate with many friends from the community in order to get by heart the details right."

Creating an alternative family

Besides, the machination device of the quinceanera just provides a way of approaching the movie's main theme: the desire to create an alternative family, an idea that the filmmakers, as gay men could readily identify with.

In fact, Glatzer and Westmoreland plant inspiration in a similarly themed movie, made decades ago, and fix in another milieu: "A Taste of Honey" (1961) directed at Tony Richardson, about a teen cast adrift according to her family after she's impregnated by dint of a black sailor. She finds a domicile and emotional support with a gawky, young, gay man who's also been ostracized by dint of society. "A Taste of Honey" came disclosed of England's so-called kitchen sink manner of moving which depicted a working-class existence previously ignored in British cinema. "We were drawn to it because it features another coming-of-age character who is unapologetic for what he is," Westmoreland said.

That character, Geoffrey finds a parallel in "Quinceanera." "Someone like Carlos has in no degree had a voice in films before," Glatzer said. "In Carlos and Magdalena, we have pair main characters struggling with issues that bring them into young adulthood."

Emily Rios, the Mexican-American actress who plays Magdalena, not at all celebrated a quinceanera herself; as a Jehovah's Witness it would violate her religious beliefs. "While we were making the movie, I inflected 16 and received my first-ever birthday cake," she said. on the other hand the themes of "Quinceanera" resonate for her: "I grew up in El Monte Calif., and teen pregnancy is everywhere, steady in my own family. in this way I drew on their experiences and brought it to the movie."

Jesse Garcia, 24 who co-stars as Carlos, nodded in agreement. "I've known scarecrows like this. As an actor, I made the chiefly honest choices I could."

And the movie's treatment of sexuality did not faze him. "What, there's a gay theme here?" he said in laugh at surprise. "I took the character because it was a great opportunity. It's thus complex, there are so many layers. There's nothing gratuitous. The movie received an R rating primarily because of the language."