Contemporary Film: No Man’s Lands
Explore the globalisation dilemma in Latin America in a film programme about the emotional rift between humans and their environment and their desperate attempts to reconnect with it.
Under the title “No Man’s Lands”, during the month of February we will present four feature-length films from Uruguay, Bolivia, Mexico and Venezuela that decry our emotional and spiritual impoverishment in the new globalised world. Forced to surrender their individual, social and territorial identities, the main characters in these films strive to reconnect with and, in some cases, survive in their now hostile homelands.
This contemporary film cycle, which will be shown to live audiences and on the Filmin channel of La Casa Encendida, ranges from the cosmic, contemplative science fiction of Uruguayan director Alex Piperno, who examines the difficult choice between the old and the modern world, to the new metafiction of Mexican filmmaker Nicolás Pereda, who invites us to reflect on how the success of the TV show Narcos and its rapid distribution via Netflix managed to change the iconography of Mexico, stereotyping the country and its people.
In addition, the programme will include Bolivian director Diego Mondaca’s anti-war movie about indigenous Aymara and Quechua people who were forced to fight under the Bolivian flag during the Chaco War, followed by Venezuelan filmmaker Jorge Thielen Armand’s intense docudrama La Fortaleza (Fortitude) about his own father’s struggle to overcome alcohol addiction against the backdrop of Venezuela’s political, social and economic crisis.
