South America
Adam Sweeting
It’s been nine years since Ben Affleck’s original portrayal of Christian Wolff in The Accountant, who’s not only an accountant but also a super-efficient assassin working for the highest bidders. In this follow-up, again directed by Gavin O’Connor and written by Bill Dubuque, Affleck barely seems to have aged, and he's still solitary, anti-social and probably autistic.However, this time around, a little more black humour has leaked into the drama. There’s a delightfully tongue-in-cheek early sequence where Wolff attends the Boise Romance Festival, a kind of pile-on dating game which is Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Judging by a Sunday Times interview last weekend, Daniel Craig now enjoys wearing brilliantly-coloured sweaters and extraordinary trousers, very much like a man running as fast as possible in the opposite direction to James Bond. He has goodbye-Bond-esque quotes to go with it.Regarding his leading role in Luca Guadagnino’s film of William Burroughs’ Queer, he observes that “male vulnerability is really interesting because, as tough as men appear to be, they’re all vulnerable.” Has M been informed of this?Burroughs’ book was nearly filmed by Steve Buscemi in 2011, starring Stanley Tucci and Read more ...
Justine Elias
Islands off the coast of southern Chile, to the Spanish and German settlers of the 19th century, represented the edge of the world. To the Huilliche, the people who’ve lived there for centuries, the land and its isolation are only the beginning.In this colonial outpost, though, the newcomers rule. When sheep fall dead in a hacienda meadow, the master of the farm lashes out at one of his indigenous shepherds, setting vicious dogs upon him. The murdered-man’s daughter tries to put a homemade cross on her father’s grave, her employer plucks it out. “He wasn’t a Christian,” says the farmer’s wife Read more ...
Sarah Kent
From its opening shot – of a flock of sheep backlit by the sun’s rays – The Settlers is visually stunning. But the beauty ends there; as the narrative unfolds, it becomes clear that everything else about this episode in Chile’s history is cruel and ugly.The year is 1901, the location a sheep farm in Tierra del Fuego, a wind-swept island at the southern tip of South America. Don José Menéndez (Alfredo Castro), who owns large swathes of land in Argentina and Chile, is erecting a fence to prevent the indigenous people from killing his livestock.A scream rends the air; the fencing cable has Read more ...
Graham Fuller
Felipe Gálvez Haberle’s Chilean Western The Settlers traces the roles played in the genocide of the country’s indigenous Selk’nam people by the Spanish businessman José Menéndez (1846-1918) and his brutal Scottish sheep station manager Alexander McLennan (1871-1917).Longtime film editor Gálvez Haberle’s feature debut as a director self-consciously harnesses the tropes of Hollywood and spaghetti Westerns, as well as heritage dramas in thrall to ruling class opulence, to deconstruct those genres as farragos of lies – cinema’s equivalent of the history “written by the winners”. The Settlers, Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“I believe Ayahuasca is something very deep,” says spiritual leader José López Sánchez in the documentary Antidote. “It’s not like selling palm oil or rubber. How many gringos have been healed with Ayahuasca? How many have discovered things about themselves and made positive changes? We should create an alliance with the Westerners; it would be a new path.”Sánchez works at the Temple of the Way of Light, a healing centre for Western tourists deep in the Peruvian rainforest. Visitors come in increasing numbers to drink Ayahuasca mixed with chacruna, a hallucinogenic cocktail that induces Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Francisca Alegría’s debut is an eco-fable about mourning and enduring love, for a mother and Mother Earth. We start by Chile’s River Cruces, where a mill pumps poison, and the fish hear a death-song in the previously “sweet and clear” water. Magdalena (Mia Maestro), who drowned herself here decades ago, breaks the surface, gasping and suddenly alive, and walks back into the world.The family Magdalena left behind are meanwhile riven. Daughter Cecilia (Leonor Varela, pictured below) is a surgeon in the city, raising her own young daughter Alma (Laura Del Rio) and teenage Tomás (Enzo Ferrada, Read more ...
mark.kidel
Perfect timing for the release of Lucas Santtana’s new album release. The return of Lula to the presidency of Brazil has been received with a surge of optimism and joy. We have witnessed the end of Bolsonaro’s corrupt, opportunistic and authoritarian years, in which the Amazon forest was opened up further to those who would destroy it, along with the indigenous people who struggle to survive against the depredations of greed.With a soft tenor voice, and accompanied by his delicate guitar playing, and skilfully integrated synthesised wind instruments, Santanna sings dreamily in praise of Read more ...
Kieron Tyler
"Descarga Royal" by Los Royal’s de Pucallpa opens proceedings. After flurries of wobbly wah-wah guitar, a driving percussion bed interweaves with a rolling guitar figure. Then, about two minutes in, the guitarist steps on the fuzz pedal. Groovy. Psychedelic too. The band’s name is taken from the tropical east-Perú city of Pucallpa, located on the Amazon tributary river Ucayali.Further in, "Humo En La Selva" by Los Invasores De Progreso is as groovy and also features fuzz guitar along with vocal chants. Progreso is located in inland south-western Perú along the Apurímac, another Amazon Read more ...
Saskia Baron
Utama won the World Dramatic Prize at Sundance this year and is tipped for an Oscar nomination, too. The film is set in a remote region in Bolivia’s arid highlands. Its gentle pace and non-professional actors give it a documentary feel but there is real narrative skill deployed. Director Alejandro Loyza Grisi started off his career as a stills photographer before moving into film and it shows in the stunningly beautiful images he’s captured with cinematographer Babara Álvarez. Virginio (José Calcina) and Sisa (Luisa Quispe) are an elderly Quechua couple who have always Read more ...
Boyd Tonkin
You invariably come away from an Aurora Orchestra concert with ears refreshed and mind revived. As a storm swept across London on Sunday, the audience at Kings Place enjoyed their own cleansing wind in the form of this genre-spanning gig in the “Voices Unwrapped” season, led by tenor Nicholas Mulroy. It took us all the way from Baroque Europe to the socially-committed “new song” movements of modern Latin America. Mulroy sang – with consistently fine tone, phrasing and colour, not to mention exemplary clarity of diction – in four languages (English, Spanish, Italian, German). Ten Aurora Read more ...
Nick Hasted
Santiago materialises through white clouds like a secret city, concealed by the elements. In this conclusion to Patricio Guzmán’s trilogy documenting the long nightmare of Chile’s coup through its landscape, the Cordillera – the country’s Andes spine – is an impassive, monumental witness to the Pinochet regime’s buried acts, and victims’ graveyard. The land, Guzmán suspects, can remember.Guzmán endured mock executions then entered exile after Pinochet’s fatal, CIA-backed 1973 ousting of left-wing President Allende. In The Cordillera of Dreams and its predecessors, the boy lover of science- Read more ...