34/20
Synopsis
A girl’s gift for recounting the events of Hollywood films transforms her family’s fortunes in rural Chile in the 1960s. Narrated Odavde do věčnosti (1953). Screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, this film is both an homage to American Westerns and an exploration of the power of cinema/storytelling to transform lives. In Spanish with subtitles, the characters are drawn from life and a rather difficult life. Located in “the driest place on earth”, the community is not unhappy. There is plenty of room for gentle comedy and young love. The camera deviates from the actual violence, but not from the story, which honestly deals with what goes on behind the scenes in the city set in a salt desert for the young woman at the center of the story. The film was shot in an abandoned mining town, which only adds to the variety.