Of course that changes -- and if the general course of events in "Travellers & Magicians" is predictable, I didn't mind one bit. Gradually, as Dondup's journey slows to a crawl, he's drawn into the hypnotic story told in installments by the monk. And so are we, to the point where this story-within-a-story pretty much takes over Norbu's movie. It's the story of two brothers, the indolent Tashi (Lhakpa Dorji) and the overlooked, ambitious Karma (Namgay Dorjee). Tashi is studying magic, but doesn't believe in it; Karma, on the other hand, has been paying attention and spikes his brother's wine with herbs that send him on a hallucinatory journey to a mountaintop refuge where a bitter old man named Agay (Gomchen Penjore) lives with Deki (Deki Yangzom), his sultry, much younger wife.

If you're paying attention, that's now a story-within-a-story-within-a-story, and although Norbu has a very light touch with magical realism, the various levels of narrative begin to infect each other: At one point, Dondup tries to flag down a passing sports car, and the Westernized, miniskirted woman at the wheel sure looks a lot like Deki, the mountaintop seductress. In the monk's story, Tashi can't seem to find his way off that mountain, but it's never clear whether magic or just young lust is at work. You might say the same thing is at work in the so-called real world; as Dondup works his way toward Thimphu by bus, truck, tractor and shoe leather, the pretty young Sonam looks more and more interesting and America seems ever farther away. "Travellers & Magicians" won't rock your cinematic sense of self, I guess, but it's a smart, winsome and often beautiful little picture; I didn't want it to end.

"Travellers & Magicians" is now playing in New York and Los Angeles, with more cities to follow.

Quick cuts: "Machuca" tackles prep school and Pinochet; the heartbreaking "Born Into Brothels"
I'm getting to Andrés Wood's "Machuca" a little late -- it's already come and gone at New York's Film Forum -- but it's a powerful and handsome film that should, in time, reach fairly deep into the heartland. Chilean movies of recent years have mostly steered away from the grim subject of that country's two-decade military dictatorship, which began in 1973 with the CIA-sponsored coup against Salvador Allende, the democratically elected left-wing president. Director Wood was an upper-middle-class 8-year-old in that year, a student at an exclusive Santiago prep school, and he uses that perspective to break the subject wide open.

Wood's protagonist, Gonzalo (the cherubic Matias Quer), is more like 11, but much of the tale is apparently drawn from Wood's own biography. Gonzalo is barely aware of the Allende government and the rising class conflict its socialist policies have provoked, but his friendship with Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna), a poor, mixed-race kid admitted to his school on scholarship, becomes Gonzalo's window into the abyss separating rich and poor, socialist and nationalist, white and Indian. As he is drawn into the Machuca family's shantytown world -- enticed partly by Pedro's short-skirted, smart-mouthed and sexually precocious neighbor (Manuela Martelli) -- Gonzalo begins to notice things about his own family. His dad has mysterious black-market connections, and his mom appears to be sleeping with an aristocratic older Argentine man in exchange for the kinds of European designer clothes nobody else in Santiago can afford.

Into this pitch-perfect period piece about teenage awakening comes Gen. Augusto Pinochet's infamous coup itself, packing a wallop that devastates Gonzalo and his world of adventure across class boundaries. I won't drop hints, but the ending of "Machuca" may haunt you for a long time. Wood's film works, first and foremost, as a powerful character drama; it's not trying to teach historical or ideological lessons. But along the way, it can't help but remind American viewers of one of the least savory examples of the United States' insistent meddling in Latin American affairs.

I'm also late on the Oscar-nominated documentary "Born Into Brothels," which documents British photographer Zana Briski's quixotic attempts to help the children she meets while shooting in Sonagachi, the notorious red-light district of Calcutta. But late is better than never when the movie is as remarkable as this one. Filmmaker Ross Kauffman (who co-directed with Briski) creates such memorable images out of squalid surroundings that I sometimes wondered whether I was being distracted from the devastating stories of these kids by the beautiful cinematography.

Briski begins by teaching the kids -- the children and even grandchildren of sex workers -- to use cameras, and the results are astonishing on a number of levels. At the very least, they document their world in a street-level way that no one else could equal, and in the case of at least two, a girl named Puja and a boy named Avijit, Briski seems to have unleashed genuine talent. But talent, intelligence, spunk and hope may not be enough for the kids of Sonagachi -- the girls will be forced onto "the line" (some within a year or two), while the boys are destined to become thieves, pimps and drug dealers.

Briski realizes that her task is essentially hopeless; the overworked social service agencies have abandoned these children, and when one of their mothers is killed by her pimp, the police won't even show up. But Briski makes the only ethical choice anyone could make: She refuses to turn her back and fights valiantly to get her group of kids out of the wretched whorehouses of Sonagachi and into boarding schools where they might have half a chance of escaping.

What happens to Avijit, Puja and the rest of Briski's junior posse will leave you weeping, in some cases out of sorrow and, in a few, out of joy. There's no storybook ending to "Born Into Brothels," only the half-redeeming idea that someone tried to throw these delightful and doomed children a tattered lifeline, tried to prove to them that there was a world beyond the streets of Calcutta, and that it was possible -- however remotely -- for them to reach it.

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