QFest's poetic bits from Latin America

Only four more days to catch Philadelphia's premiere LGBT film festival before QFest is gone - at least until next year.

There are still plenty of films to enjoy before Monday's grand finale, a screening of Big Gay Musical followed by an awards ceremony and a closing-night party.

What to watch? Here are a few suggestions:

The fest offers three remarkable, poetic films from Latin America that play with the tradition of magic realism.

Limbo. Mexican writer-director Horacio Rivera offers a strange, amusing, and endearing fable set in that non-space between heaven and hell. Isao (Francisco Barcala) is a strange, amusing, and endearing sexually ambiguous fifth grader who is molested and left for dead by a teacher. As he hovers between life and death, Isao is transported into an eerie ghost hospital. Joined by a lawyer with a gunshot in his head, the youngster must figure out the secret to his limbo state.

El nio pez. Director Luca Puenzo follows up XXY with a lesbian romance/ crime thriller/ fable about the forbidden love between Lulu (Ins Efron), a privileged girl from the suburbs of Buenos Aires and her family's Paraguayan maid, La Guayi (Mariela Vitale). The pair hatch an ill-fated plan to raise money to escape to La Guayi's village. Lulu makes it there alone to find that her girlfriend's past is shrouded in a fantastical mystery straight out of Latin American mythology.

Raging Sun, Raging Sky. Acclaimed Mexican writer-director Julin Hernndez follows up 2006's Broken Sky with a ravishing 191-minute epic poem about the power of desire, which uses stunning black-and-white and color photography instead of dialogue to tell its story. Two young lovers, Ryo (Guillermo Villegas) and Kieri (Jorge Becerra), are split apart when Ryo is abducted by Tari (Javier Olivan), a young man literally possessed by jealousy.

We enter a mythological realm when a female divinity, Corazn del ciel (Giovanna Zacarias) helps Kieri to find his lover.

If magic realism is too much of an escape, try these other festival favorites:

An Englishman in New York. Flamboyant civil servant Quentin Crisp became a gay icon in the '70s with the publication and subsequent film adaptation of his memoir, The Naked Civil Servant. John Hurt, who played Crisp, returns in this sequel about Crisp's later life as a minor celebrity.