Narrative
A young girl’s gift for recounting events from Hollywood movies transforms her family’s fortunes in rural 1960s Chile. Presents Odavde do vechnosti (1953). Seen at the Toronto International Film Festival, this film is both an homage to American westerns and an exploration of the power of cinema and storytelling to transform a life. In Spanish with subtitles, the characters are drawn from life, and a rather difficult life at that. Set in the “driest place on earth,” the community is not discontented. There is plenty of room for gentle comedy and young love. The camera strays from the actual violence, but not from the story, which deals frankly with what goes on behind the scenes in the village set in a saltpeter desert for the young girl at the center of the story. The film was shot in an abandoned mining town, which only adds to the versimilitude.