South America
Sarah Kent
Now in her mid-seventies, Anna Maria Maiolino has been making work for six decades. Its a long stretch to cover in an exhibition, especially when the artist is not well known. Perhaps inevitably, then, this Whitechapel Gallery retrospective seems somewhat sketchy and opaque, a feeling compounded by having titles in Portuguese. The work is so interesting and so diverse, though, that engaging with it is well worth the effort.Puzzling over this odd feeling of disconnect, it occurred to me that it is central to Maiolino’s practice. Born in Italy, she moved to Venezuela at the age of 12, to Brazil Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Ever since Latin American cinema re-emerged in the 1990s from years in the shadow of dictatorships, films have been distinguished by a number of trends, including dramas about the dictatorship years and the social and psychological consequences; social and family dramas; the experience of young people; the quirks and characters of everyday life. All of these themes were represented – still fresh, relevant and exciting – in San Sebastian, that preeminent annual shop window for the region’s films. Among the very best was the drama Pacified. Directed by Paxton Winters, this follows in Read more ...
Demetrios Matheou
Chilean Dominga Sotomayor’s third feature is a beautifully crafted example of the kind of Latin drama that is slow-burn and sensorial, conveying emotion through gestures and looks rather than dialogue or action. Nothing much seems to be happening, but before you know it you’ve been completed sucked in. Prompted by the writer/director’s own childhood on an ecological community outside Santiago, it offers a pithy, bitter-sweet reminder that idealism doesn’t necessarily lead to happiness and that children’s needs remain the same wherever they are: parental solidity, love, the freedom Read more ...
Adam Sweeting
Flying boldly against the #MeToo grain, Triple Frontier is a rather old-fashioned story of male buddyhood and the disappointments of encroaching middle age. The protagonists are five Special Forces veterans, brought together by private security specialist Santiago Garcia (Oscar Isaac) to raid the jungle lair of a South American drug warlord. Strangely, things don’t go according to plan.An underlying theme of the piece is the bum deal that military vets get when their service years are over. “They take your best 20 years and then they spit you out,” grunts Tom “Redfly” Davis (Ben Affleck), Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
This first feature from Paraguayan director Marcelo Martinessi is a delicate study in confinement, and of how the chance of freedom can bring an equal sense of exhilaration and apprehension. The two heroines of The Heiresses, Chela (Ana Brun) and Chiquita (Margarita Irún), are longterm lovers who inhabit an environment of familiar privilege and comfortable claustrophobia. When confronted by new circumstances that disrupt their long-established private world, the former faces an opportunity for change that may look set to break her, but actually has the potential to make her anew.The Read more ...
james.woodall
The Royal Court Theatre has long been a leader in new British drama writing. Thanks to Elyse Dodgson, who has died aged 73, it has built up an international programme like few others in the arts, anywhere. At the theatre, Elyse headed up readings, workshops (in London and abroad), exchanges and writers’ residencies that might have suggested a team of 15 or so but her department was modest in size. Her largely unsung influence on how London audiences and critics got to know what’s going on in theatre around the world was, for over two decades, incalculable. She will be sorely missed.She began Read more ...
Tom Birchenough
Atmosphere definitely dominates over narrative in Lucrecia Martel’s fourth film – long delayed, Zama follows almost a decade on from her similarly opaque The Headless Woman – but the Argentinian director offers bracing consolation for some early longeurs in her depiction of a downtrodden functionary hero who is existentially trapped in a crazed colonial world.Played by Mexican actor Daniel Giménez Cacho, Don Diego de Zama has been festering for years as a magistrate in a riverside hell-hole that must be one of the Spanish Empire’s most far-flung possessions (apparently Paraguay, though Read more ...
graham.rickson
Sverre Indris Joner: Con cierto toque de tango Henning Kraggerud (violin), Norwegian Radio Orchestra/Sverre Indris Joner, with Tango for 3 (Lawo Classics)Sverre Indris Joner is described in this disc’s notes as “the doyen of Latin American music in Norway”. Besides composing, playing, teaching and researching, he’s also found the time to act, illustrate and write plays. The Finnish love for Argentinian tango is well-documented; presumably Norwegians are also getting in on the act. Joner himself writes about the challenges of orchestrating and arranging tangos, and his solutions are Read more ...
Jasper Rees
Mario Vargas Llosa has written a thriller which opens eye-poppingly. Two wives, one staying over with the other, discover in the course of the night that they are in fact bisexual. “Chabela stayed and slept in the bed with Marisa,” it says towards the bottom of page one, “and now Marisa felt the sole of her friend’s foot on her right instep.” One thing leads to another and for the duration of the novel, set in Lima, the two best friends, whose husbands are also best friends, nip off to Miami or the sauna to pleasure each other in quite some detail. The author has plunged his readers into the Read more ...
Sarah Kent
What a superb location for a performance! The flats on the north-east corner of Islington Green back onto a crummy atrium from which a staircase leads down to a vaulted, concrete pit (pictured below). A cross between a car park and a bull ring, or a subterranean version of a de Chirico painting, this huge chamber reminded me of the stark designs of the Italian modernist, Aldo Rossi.Peering over the topmost balustrade, one sees silent figures entering the subterranean space through portals created with slender rods of light. Most are dressed in black; they are professional mourners flown in Read more ...
Saskia Baron
The woman of the title is not the first person we meet on screen; we meet her lover, a 57-year-old silver fox Orlando (Francisco Reyes). He’s getting a massage in a sauna and then returning to his office where he owns a printing company. We meet him again later. He’s looking for someone, a beautiful merengue singer performing in a fancy hotel. Marina (Daniela Vega, pictured below with Reyes) sings "Your love is yesterday’s newspaper" and they lock eyes.Marina has been Orlando’s lover for a year, they share his flat, she adores his dog Diabla. They enjoy a romantic birthday dinner in a Chinese Read more ...
Sarah Kent
“I start out as an outsider, usually photographing other outsiders, and then at some point I step over a line and become an insider,” wrote American photographer Bruce Davidson. “I don’t do detached observation.” A large number of the images in Another Kind of Life were taken by photographers who took care to befriend their subjects. Given that these were people on the margins of society – either from choice or necessity – gaining their trust was no mean feat. Once accepted, though, the photographer was in clover.In the mid-1960s, Danny Lyon took many memorable shots of Chicago bikers burning Read more ...