FACETS CINÉMATHÈQUE

January 2007

The Facets Cinémathèque is located at 1517 W. Fullerton Ave. in Chicago. For more information on films playing in the Cinémathèque, please call 773-281-4114. To order advance tickets online, visit the TicketWeb website by clicking here.

Chicago Premiere

LOS MUERTOS

WINNER
Intl Critic's Prize
Vienna Intl
Film Fest

"Alonso's second feature Los Muertos is even stronger and as confounding as La Libertad"
-FIPRESCI

"New Argentine cinema finds its poet and master in Lisandro Alonso."
-Variety

½ "Los Muertos is a stunner; dramatically it suggests bits of Joseph Conrad filtered through Gabriel Garcia Marquez. If the movie's long elegant takes of the prison yard, quiet villages and the thick green wilderness sometimes recall directors Lisandro admires--Werner Herzog, Francois Truffaut or Robert Bresson--his style is also highly original, the work of a filmmaking natural."
-Michael Wilmington, Chicago Tribune

Critics Choice! "[Alonso:] not quite the minimalist some claim, but he can make the simple act of filming feel so monumental that storytelling seems secondary...Vargas and the wilderness are such great camera subjects that a sense of quiet revelation is nearly constant"
-Jonathan Rosenbaum, Chicago Reader

Through a clearing in the dense jungle, the dead bodies of two young people appear. Thirty years later, an old man named Vargas is released from prison. Lisandro Alonso (La Libertad) opens his elegantly austere investigation of the boundaries between the natural world and the human, and the violence that lurks within them both. Seemingly anxious to get lost, Vargas buys a canoe, visits a prostitute, and then heads downriver. He methodically relieves himself of clothing and money along the way, allowing the jungle to reclaim him. Filmmaker Lisandro Alonso refuses to explain his strategy of metaphorical interpretations: the isolation of Argentina; the path from guilt to absolution; ex-criminals reintegrating into society. But like Mexico's Japón or Thailand's Blissfully Yours, Los Muertos luxuriates in the sensual sights and sounds of the tropics, with vivid images of color and texture. Alonso is one of the most talented and distinct voices of Argentinian cinema, as he boldly explores an inner world that is revealed through nature, but with far more unsettling implications.

Directed by Lisandro Alonso, Argentina, 2004, 35mm, 82 mins. In Spanish with English subtitles.

Official site Sense of Cinema: director interview FIPRESCI

Chicago Reader

Showtimes:
Fri., Jan. 5 at 7 & 9 pm
Sat.-Sun., Jan. 6-7 at 3, 5, 7 & 9 pm
Mon.-Thurs., Jan. 8-11 at 7 & 9 pm

Tickets:

$9 general admission
FREE for Facets Members!

For all Cinémathèque inquiries, contact Charles Coleman at 773.281.9075 or charles@facets.org

Academy of Motion Picture Arts & Sciences