Seventeen years after the victory of Mondo Grúa, the film that revealed the talent of Argentinean Pablo Trapero, Latin America triumphs again in the Venice International Film Critics’ Week thanks to the Colombian film Los Nadie, winner of the Circolo del Cinema di Verona Audience Award of this 31st edition.
Los Nadie tells the story of five friends who, during their late adolescence full of intense restlessness, astonishment, unexpressed tenderness and manifested rage, survive in the margins of Medellín: a city that attracts and excludes at the same time, a city that seduce them with their promises but also pushes them away with hostility. Music, street art and friendship are their weapons of resistance in the hope of a rite of passage that is able to transform them in something different.
“This is a film – says Mesa – that speaks about a generation of disenchanted dreamers that feel the need to embrace the unknown and to explore the world by themselves, in order to escape from the problems and the violence that surrounds them on a daily basis”, offering at the same time a portray of “a movement, the anarcho-punks, which is one of the most enigmatic and radical movements of our time”.
Shot only in seven days (but imagined for eight months), produced with merely two thousand dollars, Los Nadie (literally The Nobodies) it’s – as explained by selection committee member Beatrice Fiorentino in her essay in the Critics’ Week catalogue – “ spirit de jeunesse at its more pure, vivid and kicking state (…) for Juan Sebastián Mesa, who debuts in long feature developing characters and stories from a previous short, it’s enough a song, a tear and a gesture to evoke the tenderness that coexists with the rage and the disorientation of an entire generation”.
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30.08 — 09.09