South American Film

South America holds a wealth of artistic innovation. To me, I feel that the Latin-American literature boom of the 20th Century is carrying over into the best South American films.

First up is the fantastic ‘drug-crime’ pairing of City of God and Elite Squad which put Brazil on the 21st century film map.

Argentina won Academy Award acclaim with The Secret in Their Eyes featuring Ricardo Darin, the star of Argentinian film. I’d also recommend the brilliantly hilarious Wild Tales (also starring Darin) to add to your Argentine collection.

With films like Embrace of the Serpent, Colombia is also making headlines. And don’t forget Chile, a country bolstered by Pablo Larrain, one of South America’s most promising directors (see Neruda for evidence).

With a world of film at your fingertips, South America is a fantastic place to start your film quest! Find the best South American films below, or click on a country below to go somewhere particular:

Argentina, Bolivia, Brazil, Chile, Colombia, Ecuador, Guyana, Paraguay, Peru, Suriname, Uruguay, Venezuela

Wild Tales (Relatos Salvajes)

Wild Tales Film Difficulty Ranking: 2

I was sitting near an Argentinian when I first saw this film in the cinema. He was completely wrapped up in this brilliant set of sketches from Damian Szifron. He was laughing throughout, as well as cursing and cheering on the characters on screen. However, he wasn’t alone. I was also laughing, cursing, and cheering with the rest of the audience. You don’t have to be Argentinian to enjoy this one, you just have to have a little bit of a sense of humour (the darker your humour the better).

Why Watch Wild Tales?

To see Argentina through a series of short stories
You will be laughing, surprised, shocked, feeling guilty, and more.
To see some great camera angles (think of the car trunk shot in Pulp Fiction)
Produced by the Almodovar, highly rated on iMDB, and nominated for an Oscar, this film has some cred (if you don’t trust me).

The Breakdown

The first short film starts with a waist-down shot of a woman rolling a wheeled suitcase to an airport desk. To her surprise, the airline staff offer her a free flight for no extra miles. She boards the plane and starts chatting to a music critic next to her. After a while they realise that they have a mutual connection, Pasternak, the woman’s ex-boyfriend who was heavily critiqued for his music by the music critic. To which more and more people chime in saying they know him. Why are they all on the same flight? Coincidence?

One thing you can’t miss in this film is the camera framing. The film is shot from a bunch of different angles and positions that are both cool and a good fit. For example, the story set in the restaurant when the chef and waitress are arguing about the customer in the kitchen. The lighting is low and moody, the colours are strong but not warm, and there are two heavily lit pass through windows to the kitchen. As the waitress runs back to the kitchen to argue with the chef, we see a shot of them from the restaurant, one framed within each of the two pass through windows as if they are portraits. It sort of shows that they are both individuals and not in agreement, and that the chef is going to do what she wants regardless of what the waitress says.

Also, look out for other cool camera positions. One of my favourites was in the last sketch ‘Until Death Do Us Part.’ The director attaches a camera to the outside of kitchen door with the camera pointing back into the kitchen through a glass window. As a result, we can see the characters running to the door, pushing it open, and then see which direction they choose to go in the hall. The camera position allows us to see all the above without a single cut, making the shot feel more natural.

Conclusion

The sketches in Wild Tales look great, are acted well, are gripping, and are hilarious. What more could you want from a movie? Well, actually, in addition to the above, the film is a surprisingly good portrait of Argentine society. It depicts corruption, classism, and injustice in addition to all the vengeance and violence. This film is a winner!

Araby – The Enchanting Story of an Everyday Life

Araby Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

The brilliance of Araby is hard to pinpoint. This analogy might not do it justice, but it’s a bit like going to a retirement home and meeting a fascinating storyteller who intimately reveals to you their life story in 90 minutes. There’s nothing particularly special about Cristiano’s life in Araby, but it’s told so intimately and warmly, that you just can’t help but watch and listen. The patient viewer will reap it’s rewards.

From: Brazil, South America
Watch: Trailer, Kanopy, Rent on Amazon, Buy on Amazon
Next: Tabu, Djon Africa, Extraordinary Stories

Read The Full Review

Neruda

Film Buff Ranking: 3

Neruda is a rather special take on the famous Chilean poets life. Instead of focusing on his fabulous poetry, Neruda focuses on his Pablo’s run from persecution for being a communist. Throughout, Neruda is being hunted by a police inspector named Peluchonneau. In all, the film reminded me of a Borgesian short story with a hilariously Quixotic character.

Why watch Neruda?

You have read and enjoyed Borges
Multiple narratives – try and follow this one! Is it real?
Chilean history -communist persecution (for more on communist persecution, see a real account of the Indonesian death squads here)
For an interesting take on the biopic (think of Frida)

The Breakdown

The film starts with cameras following Neruda through a crowd. He makes his way through a government building greeting people next to him. He finally makes it through to a room where the president and the other senators are (for Neruda is also a senator), goes straight over to the urinal conveniently placed at the side of the room and berates the president out loud whilst he is taking a piss. What a scene! It certainly sets it up for a rather surreal and jovial film.

Neruda is a masterful invention. The character of Peluchonneau, played by the wonderful Gabriel Garcia Bernal, a character invented to embellish Neruda’s reputation. He is Neruda’s (or the director’s Larrain’s) puppet, a tool to show Neruda’s creative vision. Even the name Peluchonneau is perfect, as “peluche” in Spanish refers to a stuffed animal toy. This is exactly what Peluchonneau is, a character that is invented, used to entertain us, and then forgotten when we grow older. Luckily for the film and for us, the director and screenwriters script him perfectly.

Just like in Y Tu Mama Tambien, the events at the front of the screen take centre stage. You can see the effects of the communist persecution in the background. People are being dragged off to concentration camps, homeless kids are wandering the streets begging for money, and indigenous populations are being subjected to landlords. Furthermore these landlords deliberately break the law, just because the government does not care about them anyway. This is the real post-WW2 Chile, not the Chile concerned with a fictional or non-fictional chase of Neruda that pre-occupied everything else.

Conclusion

Neruda is definitely worth a watch. Fans of literature will love the construction of Pelloneau and his fictional existence. It is a little bit of a fight club in this regard. Pelloneau could not exist without Neruda and Neruda’s excellence is heightened by Pelloneau. As a Latin America Literature lover, this truly captured the unique spirit of the continent.

Dark Skull – A Dark Journey into Subterranean Bolivia

Dark Skull Film Difficulty Ranking: 4

Dark Skull isn’t your typical character driven drama. The dark environment of the Huanuni mines and Bolivian city streets are a long way away from familiar landscapes. Pretty much the entire film is set in darkness, either during the nighttime above ground, or underground during the daytime. Day starts to blend into night, and scenes above ground start to dissolve into the scenes below ground as both are shrouded in darkness. We journey into the subterranean with Elder as his mind is consumed by the abyss. Is he in control, or is the environment driving him mad?

From: Bolivia, South America
Watch: Trailer, Vimeo
Next: A Touch of Sin, Tony Manero, El Dorado XXI

The Breakdown

We’re introduced to Elder in a vice filled opening. We see him chase after a woman and rob her, before retreating down a dark alley to drink and smoke. He looks like Gollum from Lord of the Rings, lurking in the shadows whilst he fondles a crack pipe in his hands. Next he’s in a hectic night club, before he’s being chased along the street by a group of men. The opening establishes Elder’s depraved existence in the shadows of an anonymous Bolivian city.

From there, Dark Skull cuts to a nighttime search party of men and women lighting up the hills and canyons of rural Bolivia with flashlights. The juxtaposition between the noisy built up urban environment in which Elder resides, and the silent, empty rural environment is noticeable. Perhaps Dark Skull isn’t following a linear narrative.

The search party finds what they’re looking for in the dead body of Elder’s dad, slumped on the ground behind a shrub. The group starts preparing his burial as Elder is recalled from the city. He’s been ordered home to live with his lone grandmother and assume his dead father’s job in the mines.

No one asks him whether he wants to work in the mines. Down inside the earth, he tells his new colleagues that the job is only temporary and he will be moving on. However, after seeing him struggling to get by in the opening, it doesn’t look like he has anything to escape to. For the foreseeable future, it looks like he’ll be spending his days under the same ground his father is buried in. It’s not an environment he’s accustomed to.

In the first day or two underground, director Kiro Russo immerses us in the harsh, claustrophobic underground tunnels of the mining complex. Firstly, the noise of the machines is so overbearing that the director dissolves a shot of Elder’s face into a montage of close ups of machinery. It’s as if Elder’s becoming part of the machine. With it, he’s losing his personality to the collective workforce, much like the machinery montages you might have seen in early Soviet film. Secondly, it’s dark. The only light comes from the head torches and flash lights the miners carry. Everywhere else is a dark indistinguishable abyss.

Overwhelmed by the machinery, Elder ventures out into the abyss on his own to take a break. As he wanders, Russo starts rotating the camera vertically as well as horizontally to further disorientate us as Elder gets lost. Alone in the darkness, the scenes reminded me of the Nietzsche quote: “when you gaze long into the abyss, the abyss gazes also into you”. Elder has ventured into the abyss, and the abyss has consumed him. His life and freedom has been vanquished, and he’s now stuck toiling in his father’s life until he joins him permanently underground. With nothing to strive for and his own ego being dissolved, he drinks and smokes to escape thinking about his fate. He makes petty acts of resistance, like pissing on his colleagues bags and feigning injury, to throw up a middle finger to his fate.

But you could also view Dark Skull as a story of one man’s degeneration from working in the mines. Later in the film, Elder is pictured in the same nightclub as in the opening. It’s not clear if he’s revisiting the club, is imagining it, or he’s stuck in a cycle. Perhaps the opening scenes are a flash forward to an Elder already messed up from working in the mines. Seen this way, Dark Skull becomes film about the degradation of one man forced to work in an oppressive mine instead of the story of a drunkard without ambition.

What to Watch Next

Kiro Russo draws on a wide range of influences to make Dark Skull. Most noticeably, Dark Skull feels and looks like Chinese Noir, such as the dark underworld of The Wild Goose Lake and the depraved characters and hopelessness in A Touch of Sin. (Speaking of depraved characters and hopelessness, you could also watch Pablo Larrain’s Tony Manero and/or Post Mortem).

Dark Skull also references early Soviet film techniques that you see in its montages and disorientating dissolve cuts of Man With A Movie Camera. Albeit in this case, the techniques are used to create hopeless confusion, instead of excitement for modernity.

Or, for more mining in darkness in rural South America, check out Peru’s slow film El Dorado XXI, featuring another mine isolated in an incredibly harsh environment.

The Magic Gloves – A Deadpan Look at Everyday Lives

The Magic Gloves Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

If you’re a fan of deadpan humor, look no further. In The Magic Gloves, Martin Rejtman takes the mundane, everyday meetings and conversations that plague our lives and turns them into something to laugh at. There’s nothing special about any of the characters, they’re all regular people like us passing through life without much happening. They also don’t seem to be in control of what’s going on. Life just happens to them and they’re happy to follow where it leads them. When things do happen and their lives look like their going to turn into a success, their luck is quickly balanced out to humble them. But the film never feels heavy or depressing to watch as it makes fun of the trivialities and coincidences we give importance to in our lives. After all nothing really matters.

From: Argentina, South America
Watch: Trailer, JustWatch
Next: Whisky, Rapado, Barking Dogs Never Bite