18/21
Line of Events
A girl’s gift for retelling events from Hollywood movies changes her family’s fate in rural Chile in the 1960s with Odavde do vječnosti (1953). The film, which screened at the Toronto International Film Festival, is both an homage to American Westerns and an exploration of the power of cinema/storytelling to change a life. In Spanish with subtitles, the characters are taken from real life, and a pretty difficult life at that. The film is set in “the driest place on earth,” and the community is not unhappy. There’s plenty of room for gentle comedy and young love. The camera turns away from the actual violence, but not from the story, which candidly addresses what goes on behind the scenes in the town in a saltpeter desert for the young woman at the center of the story. The film was shot on location in an abandoned mining town, which only adds to the realism.