Multimedia Collection
The Green Wall
VHS
110 minutes
PN1997 .G75 R63 1990
A breakthrough film from the cinema of South America. The Green Wall was made in Peru and went on to win film festival awards throughout the world and to capture the hearts of audiences everywhere. "There is that rare moment when the audience is witness to something extraordinary, a real work of art," wrote a critic about one screening of The Green Wall. "I haven't seen an audience react that way in ages. People were visibly staggering away from their seat."
Based on the filmmaker Armando Robles Godoy's own experiences of homesteading in the Peruvian jungle, The Green Wall is "a bitter and beautiful movie," in which "Godoy translates his experiences into film poestry rather than flat reportage and uses the physical environment (exquisitely photographed by his cameraman brother, Mario) as a great natural mystery, idyllic but cruel, rich but unyielding to the will of a handsome young settler (Mexican star Julio Aleman, in a vibrant performance) who is determined to survive there with his family. The hero's relationship with his wife and child...are established in an eloquent opening sequence - when a torrential downpour tells the young parents that today they can do nothing better than lie abed and make love, at least until the boy wakes up...." (Pauline Kael, The New Yorker
The idyll is broken by the bureaucracy in far-off Lima and at the film's end: "The blow comes from the rain forest near their house, where father and son have constructed a mock city of clay as a symbol of the civilized stupidity they fought to escape. The film's final sequence, an almost wordless funeral, is masterful movie making, a haunting glimpse of humanity that lingers in the mind."
Spanish with English subtitles.
Distributed by Facets Video (http://www.facets.org/asticat/)
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