33/25
Plot
The girl’s gift for retelling events in Hollywood films changes her family’s fate in rural 1960s Chile. Features Odavde do vechnosti (1953). Screening at the Toronto International Film Festival, this film is both a tribute to the American Western and an exploration of the power of film/narration to change lives. In Spanish with subtitles, the characters are taken from real life, and they are quite complicated lives. Located in the “driest place on earth,” the community is not unhappy. There’s plenty of room for tender comedy and young love. The camera turns away from the real violence, but not from the story, which candidly tells what goes on behind the scenes in a desert-scape town for a young woman at the center of the story. The film was shot on location in an abandoned mining town, which only adds to its versatility.