Buenos Dias! Welcome to Thursday Movie Picks hosted by Wandering Through the Shelves, this week’s theme is movies in the Spanish language.
Patricio Guzmán’s breathtakingly moving look at the reign of Augusto Pinochet is a beautiful masterpiece. Having ruled Chile with an iron fist for over fifteen years the high numbers of those exiled, imprisoned or executed under his reign remains a shockingly high statistic, considering the fact that the attention he receives is very little in comparison to other dictators. It is clear that the wounds opened during the period are still open almost thirty years after his dictatorship ended. The viewer discovers the impact of the Pinochet regime from the words of those who survived the concentration camps and those who still search the desert hoping that they will find the remains of a loved dumped unceremoniously in the desert by the country’s military. From the viewpoint of those interviewed and the documentary’s director, the women who search the desert are just like the astronomers searching the night sky. Breathtaking stuff.
Do you know this really annoying, happy person who always seems to be a ray of sunshine no matter what the situation? Do you dislike them for it? Well Cesar (Luis Tosar) does and he wants to make Clara’s (Marta Etura) a living hell. You won’t be sleeping tight after this. Sleep Tight is a creepy thriller.
In the 1980s and the majority of the 90s movie violence was blamed for delinquent behaviour, particularly in England. This Spanish thriller looks at how society has been dulled to violence so much so that it’s easy to find extreme violence as though it was an everyday thing, it is even displayed on front pages of mainstream newspapers. Remember the live murder of Alison Parker and Adam Ward? Some mainstream websites auto played the video of the killings and newspapers such as the New York Post, New York Daily News, Daily Mail(this one has a cartoon graphic of a gunshot!) and The Sun posted frames of the killing. Fucking barbaric. Thesis is very much a film about society’s dulled senses to violence.