MIFF Session 7: LOS SILENCIOS

As the murky dark is here and there revealed to be a rowboat approaching a jetty by night we might fancifully think of the River Styx. We should keep that thought. Although La Isla de la Fantasia is a real place, hanging between nationalities and statelessness near Columbia and Brazil, what we are about to see will be a strange mix of slice of life veracity and gently eerie supernature.

Amparo and her two children have fled the conflict in their native Columbia for refugee status on Fantasia and to lodge a reparation application for the loss of her husband and daughter in the war. The bureaucratic day-to-day seems disturbingly out of sorts with the warmth of her aunt's welcome and the steady progress she makes getting her son and daughter to the local school and a job for herself. As time progresses and her son Fabio takes up with the local drug thugs and her daughter Nuria is befriended by the daughter of the island's leader and is told by her that the dead might still be with them and can play tricks. Is the appearance of Nuria's father who meets her armed with a finger to his lips, real and if so what kind of real?

The suspension of the lives of the Islanders whose stilted houses put them only a little above the water suggests that the sense of some greater state, a kind of spreading irresolution between the urge to survive and the need to grieve is at work. One scene seems to bring the two sides together with people giving accounts of how the warfare has left them adrift from normal life, losing definition, half dead. Finally, it is a ceremony of departure that ties the threads into something workable with the dead marked from the living joining each other in a lament that brings us to the point of what has been a gentle but often perplexing hour and a half.

As much Werckmeister Harmonies as Uncle Boonmee, Los Silencios will, if you can find yourself in front of it, haunt you.