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"A startling debut … as probing, subtle and affecting as any psychological drama could wish to be." – Hollywood Reporter
Winner of the Golden Lion at the Venice Film Festival, Desde Allá is the richly observed and provocative first feature from Venezuelan writer/director Lorenzo Vigas. A patient, powerful study of thwarted love and repressed intention set in the mean streets of Caracas, it’s a mesmerising and assured work of cinema that marks the arrival of one of South America's brightest new filmmaking talents.
Middle-aged and lonely, Armando (Alfredo Castro, one of Pablo Larraín’s regular actors) spends his spare time cruising poor neighbourhoods and propositioning young men. When an encounter with the fierce, short-tempered Elder goes awry, Armando becomes obsessed, eventually bringing the youth into his home after he is savagely beaten by a local gang. Armando's attempts to foster an intimacy between the two are initially thwarted, but as the two damaged, difficult men fence and parry their way around dependence, a dangerous power struggle emerges, and it becomes clear that far more is at stake here than something so simple as love.
"Vigas unobtrusively builds the story to show how something brutal and slippery in the beginning may paradoxically give rise to something passionate and sincere … magnetic." – Cinema Scope
