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This stylistically daring, supernaturally tinged film, which won Venice’s Orizzonti Special Jury Prize, follows a miner’s labyrinthine (head)trip through the Bolivian capital.
Three miners leave their rural homes for the crowded, chaotic city of La Paz, seeking work. When one of them begins to exhibit symptoms of a mysterious respiratory illness, his journey around the capital’s busy markets, bustling streets and witch-doctor-populated alleys mutates into a dark, formally thrilling dissection of the urban jungle – one that also makes room for an 80s music-video-style dance sequence.
Interlacing cinéma vérité sequences with wildly inventive experimental flourishes, Bolivian writer/director Kiro Russo’s second feature is a heady blend of stark observation and dazed dislocation – a cinematic fever dream of the most potent quality. Driven by Julio César Ticona’s unrelenting performance as a man consumed by his search for answers, El Gran Movimiento is a gutsy audiovisual kaleidoscope that seems to shift premise and genre the further it spirals into a beguiling, near-psychedelic fugue.
“Harsh and compelling, weightless and strange; the filmic equivalent of a bottle of smoke.” –The Observer
