Friday, June 15, 7:00 p.m. Victoria • BAY AREA PREMIERE
Wednesday, June 20, 1:15 p.m. Castro
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| Retablo |
Director Álvaro Delgado Aparicio L. had a short film, El acompañante (The Companion) in Frameline 37* (2013); I was decidedly unimpressed, finding it a pointless exercise in characters I didn’t care about and into whom I gained no insight. Aparicio is back this year with his debut feature, returning to the Quechua culture and the retablo art form, small figurines arranged in a diorama as an altarpiece, but with much more interesting characters and some actual plot and dialogue. Noé (Amiel Cayo, pictured left) is teaching his son Segundo (Junior Béjar Roca, pictured right) the craft. Unfortunately, Segundo discovers that Noé is also fooling around with some of the men in their village, something unacceptable in the brutish macho culture around them. Segundo struggles to reconcile his love for his father with the shame, ostracism and violence Noé has brought upon the family.
Quechua is the third most widely spoken first language in South America, behind only Portuguese and Spanish, but estadounidense audiences know little or nothing about the people or their culture. For that reason, I bumped this film up to highly recommended, despite its shortcomings, particularly the fact that Noé’s inner life is left unexamined, but it is Segundo’s coming of age at the focus of the film.
• IMDb • trailer with English subtitles (YouTube) (Vimeo) •
Note: this film contains scenes of homophobic violence, more graphic in sound than in images.
*Technical Note: the Frameline web archive has a configuration error. Although the website is not secure (i.e., it should use http, not https), it automatically redirects to the secure URL, which fails due to an invalid security certificate. You must set a security exception in your browser to view the site. Alternately, you can view the Frameline 37 Festival Guide here.
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