In viability and visibility Latin American cinema is lorded over by Cuba, Mexico, Argentina and Brazil, with Peru, maybe Ecuador and Venezuela, on a far distant second tier. But Colombian films? When was the last time one appeared here? Who, for that matter, can name even a single title from that mountainous Caribbean/Pacific country which makes headlines for all the wrong reasons? (Hint: try Camila Motta's chilling 1993 cinema vérité, Secuestro: A Story of a Kidnapping.)

Overwhelmingly, and understandably, showcasing the above Big Four, as well, the Film Society at Lincoln Center's fourth "Recent Films from Latin America: LatinBeat 2003" (September 5-28) includes twenty-four features, plus assorted sidebars, panels and filmmaker interviews in a total of thirty-four separate programs, from eleven countries in that area, many co-produced with Europe. Fortunately, along with some few works also from Chile, Uruguay and Puerto Rico, Luis Alberto Restrepo's The First Night/La primera noche is included and definitely worth serious consideration.

For over twenty years, that director has been making features, shorts, documentaries, commercials, videos and TV series, and he notes that his co-authored script for this 2001 film is based on a quite simple vision, a single scene rather than a long-developed theme: that of a mother glimpsed one night preparing a bed of newspapers for her baby in the streets of Pereira.

With only the most rudimentary of backgrounds -- the magnificence of the Andes left unseen, for example, while Bogotá is reduced to a streetcorner -- without tricks or special effects, almost without bloodshed and with realistically deceptive "pops" for gunfire in the midst of war and massacre, the film unspectacularly details the destruction and displacement of the people of an isolated mountain hamlet. Drugs do not figure here at all; the internecine strife between army and guerrilla insurgents is enough, and those pitiful few not shattered by bullets and civil war brutality, are displaced to find degradation and ruin on cold urban concrete.

He more than she at the end of emotional tether, a terrified Toño/Tonio Rojas (John Álex Toro) and Paulina (Carolina Lizarazo) scrabble through barbed wired highland jungle carrying her two infant sons. Extra-legally brother- and sister-in-law, they bicker and squabble but are unable to separate even when he has shed his military fatigues and they have reached a town for a few days. When she insists on going to Bogotá to seek a schoolmate Gladys whose phone number is on the back of a snapshot, he grudgingly accompanies her and the infants.

In a series of increasingly short takes and rapid cuts, the past is revealed and related to the present of this first -- tragically only -- night, cold, unsheltered, ironically fronting a Newfoundland Travel Agency shop window with posters for Antarctica and Exotic (wartorn) Guatemala. Toño sulks while the girl talks openly with a homeless man (Hernán Méndez) he doesn't trust, tends to her babies and, wonderfully, nervously moves her bare legs to keep warm.

In the village and under the loving but watchful eye of their widowed mother (Ana María Sánchez), Toño and older brother Wilson had vied for the attentions of newcomer Paulina and talked of joining variously the army or the mountain guerrillas under Uncle Joaquín (Diego Vásquez). Given social conservatism, women bear more than their share of suffering.

Wilson wins the girl, fathers her children but leaves for the mountains and another woman, while Toño enlists and winds up in a military unit stationed outside the village. The soldier cannot reveal that this is his home but must protect family and neighbors from the incoherent madness of warfare, frightened confused soldiers and Sergeant Castellanos (Enrique Carriazo).

Realistically avoiding the spectacular, adhering to simple but true production values -- although only the red-capped homeless man is anywhere near unwashed and scruffy enough -- and aided by fine acting, The First Night portrays a naturalistic world in which selflessness and love do not in and of themselves win out, in which men are cruel, nature indifferent -- the village river is for washing, gossiping, making love and also killing -- cities cold, colors dark, all seems night, and fire warms only slightly and as easily consumes. Fate, it says, is beyond our control, and what awaits us all is black and gloomy apart from fleeting chance moments of communication and shared warmth.

With Gregory Nava and Anna Thomas in the equally depressing El Norte (1993), Restrepo and his cast reflect the despair on our very doorstep. One indeed ought to wonder how long our near neighbors' plight can effectively go on ignored before it explodes to engulf this Hemisphere, North and South.

(Released by Congo Films; not rated by MPAA.)