This 1991 Argentine-Uruguayan production by Argentinean writer-director Adolfo Aristarain, nominated for an Academy Award before being disqualified on a technicality, is better than most foreign Oscar nominees. Aristarain compares the plot, which involves the recollected adolescence of a boy growing up in Argentina’s Bermejo Valley, to that of Shane, but this hardly does it justice. The boy’s parents are an idealistic Jewish doctor (Cecilia Roth) and sociology professor turned schoolteacher (Federico Luppi) who’ve helped found a cooperative of poor shepherds with an outspoken and committed nun. The Shane figure is a Spanish geologist-mercenary hired by the principal landowner in the region. All these characters, along with the illiterate daughter of a local foreman the boy falls in love with, are treated with a novelistic density and ambiguity, and you’re likely to remember them afterward as you would real people. Music Box, Friday through Thursday, November 25 through December 1.