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José Calcina as Virginio in Utama. Alejandro Loayza Grisi: 'We knew the best choice was always going to be to have natural people doing the acting' Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s Utama pairs the sweeping landscapes of the Bolivian Highlands with an intimate story of love and life for ageing Quecha llama shepherd Virginio and his wife Sisa (real life husband and wife José Calcina and Luisa Quispe). With climate change affecting the water supply, life is increasingly tough, but they still don’t welcome the suggestion from their grandson Clever (Santos Choque), who comes to visit, that they should go back to the city with him. The film is playing in the Best of Fest section at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival this week and opens in the UK on Friday. We caught up with Grisi to talk about the themes and challenges of his film.

How difficult...

Meditative drama follows non-professional leads playing a farming couple being driven from their home in the Andean plateau by global heating

Bolivian director Alejandro Loayza Grisi started his career as a photographer then turned to cinematography; now he makes his feature debut with this slow and beautiful-looking drama set high on the Andean plateau. It’s a film that unfolds at such a measured pace that at times it felt to me like a piece of cinematic mindfulness or a concentration training exercise. I wouldn’t have been surprised if a voiceover gently interrupted proceedings, like a mindfulness app, to gently instruct us not to let our thoughts wander.

Utama opens with the staggeringly gorgeous image of an elderly man walking towards the sun rising golden over mountains. This is Virginio (José Calcina), whose weathered face is as cracked as the earth beneath his feet. Virginio spends his days tramping...

Utama is simply beautiful. From performances to shot composition and tone, Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s Bolivian drama is one of the year's best foreign language films. The simplicity of the production design combined with stunning costumes provides a movie-going experience unlike any other in 2022. Utama is laser-focused on the plight of a single family, yet leaves room for much larger themes with ease. One can reach out and touch the love expressed by everyone involved in the making of the film.

A water crisis in the Bolivian highlands leads a small community to decide whether to stay in their ancestral home or leave for the city. Virginio (José Calcina) and Sisa (Luisa Quispe) have a herd of llamas and as the surrounding environment begins to change, Virginio seems uninterested in Sisa’s choice on the matter and wants to stay at all costs. The elderly couple is soon visited by...

You hear “Utama” before you see it: the sounds of wind interrupted suddenly by chimes tolling, underlying a simple black and white title treatment. The sound ushers us into the spectacular opening frame, the image of a man standing on an arid landscape, facing a magnificent golden horizon glowing in the distance, teeming with dramatic clouds. It’s in this image and these sounds that one can find the entire thesis of “Utama,” in which a man faces a formidable unknown.

“Utama,” which means “our home” in Aymara, is the debut feature of photographer and cinematographer Alejandro Loayza Grisi, and is the official Bolivian selection for the Best International Film Academy Award after winning the World Cinema Dramatic Grand Jury Prize at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival. It is a spare and yet unsparing film, and a bold artistic statement from an emerging filmmaker.

Non-professional actors José Calcina and Luisa Quispe,...

Utama (Our House) Kino Lorber Reviewed for Shockya.com & BigAppleReviews.net, linked from Rotten Tomatoes by Harvey Karten Director: Alejandro Loayza Grisi Screenwriter: Alejandro Loaya Grisi Cast: José Calcina, Luisa Quispe, Santos Choque Screened at: Critics’ Link, NYC, 10/6/22 Opens: November 4, 2022 in New York’s Film Forum Nowadays in the U.S., people are divided between […]

The post Utama (Our House) Movie Review appeared first on Shockya.com.

One of the most visually striking movies coming out of Sundance Film Festival this year was Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s Grand Jury Prize (World Cinema Dramatic) winner Utama. Shot by cinematographer Barbara Álvarez (Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman), the film was selected as Bolivia’s Best International Feature Film Oscar entry and ahead of a theatrical release from Kino Lorber starting November 4, the first trailer has arrived.

Utama follows an elderly Quechua couple that has been living a tranquil life for years. While Virginio takes their small herd of llamas out to graze, Sisa maintains their home and walks for miles with the other local women to fetch precious water. When an uncommonly long drought threatens everything they know, they must decide whether to stay and maintain their traditional way of life or admit defeat and move in with family members in the city. Virginio and Sisa’s dilemma...

Exclusive: Alejandro Loayza Grisi and Santiago Loayza Grisi, the brother filmmakers behind Sundance prize winner Utama, have signed with Cinetic Media for management.

The title of the Bolivian filmmakers’ most recent work, which won the Grand Jury Prize in World Cinema Dramatic competition at Sundance 2022, translates to “our home.” The critically acclaimed eco-drama centers on an elderly Quechua couple in the Bolivian highlands that have been living the same daily life for years. During an uncommonly long drought, Virginio (José Calcina) and his wife Sisa (Luisa Quispe) face a dilemma: resist, or be defeated by the environment and time itself.

Utama is currently playing at the San Francisco Film Festival, and has been acquired by Kino Lorber for a theatrical release later this year. Alejandro wrote the film, which also marked his feature directorial debut. Santiago produced under their shingle Alma Films, where they’re partnered with their filmmaker father,...

After nine days, 84 feature films, and 59 short films, the Sundance juries have announced their winners, with all films screenings over Saturday and Sunday and tickets now on sale. One can check out the full list below, with Nanny, The Exiles, Cha Cha Real Smooth, and Navalny bringing home the major prizes, and see our complete coverage here.

Grand Jury Prizes

The U.S. Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic was presented to Nikyatu Jusu for Nanny / U.S.A. — Aisha is an undocumented nanny working for a privileged couple in New York City. As she prepares for the arrival of the son she left behind in Senegal, a violent supernatural presence invades her reality, threatening the American dream she is painstakingly piecing together. Cast: Anna Diop, Michelle Monaghan, Sinqua Walls, Morgan Spector, Rose Decker, Leslie Uggams.

Juror Chelsea Bernard said: “For this Grand Jury Prize we celebrate a movie that flooded us...

When one is asked to picture those who are most impacted by global warming, the imagination flashes to Inuits on a melting ice floe or Maldives natives threatened by rising tides, not Bolivian shepherds who graze their livestock on the Altiplano, nearly 12,000 feet above sea level. But the residents of these remote highlands are also endangered, as director Alejandro Loayza Grisi reveals in his sublime, quietly elegiac feature debut, “Utama,” focusing on an elderly couple who refuse to relocate to the nearby city of La Paz, even as mountain glaciers melt, rains become less reliable and their herd of llamas slowly succumb to dehydration.

Played by actual couple José Calcina and Luisa Quispe, long-married Virginio and Sisa share a small mud house without electricity or running water. Fetching water has always been a chore for Sisa — that’s her responsibility, Virginio sternly reminds her, whereas he handles the animals — but lately,...

Utama (Our Home) is precisely the sort of discovery that justifies film festivals and makes them useful: a small, hitherto unheard-of work from an out-of-the-way country that grabs you from the opening minutes and afterwards makes you want to tell your friends they’ve got a real treat to look forward to. A rare Bolivian entry in a major festival, this Sundance World Dramatic Competition title and feature debut by Alejandro Loayza Grisi is gorgeously made and brings to life a backwater existence in a distant land with skill and assurance.

“Backwater” should actually be “no water,” as such is the case in a Bolivian high desert more than two miles above sea level where even the wells have gone dry. Young people are nowhere to be seen and the aged couple we meet, weather-beaten Virginio and Sisa, live in a small cabin, speak in a version of the ancient Incan Quechua language,...

Utama is about the effects of climate change and its particular impact on South America’s indigenous communities, no doubt, but its other urgent subject depicts the challenges of a really ornery grandpa. The grandfatherly traits of having your tea brewed to a certain temperature, the non-negotiability of a spot on a particular armchair, and an absolute insistence on daily routine are all in evidence, and in a film that aims to be a universal story––where its lessons can be applied in any locale––this is still the element that rings truest. It’s quite a shock of recognition, as grandson Clever visits their home, to be branded a “brat” by gramps Virginio (Santos Choque); then he is calmly invited to the table for dinner with a reassuring pat from nana Sisa (Luisa Quispe).

In a Clash track not considered their absolute finest, Joe Strummer wondered “should I stay or should I go.

By telling the story of an elderly indigenous couple as they eke out a living in the arid Bolivian highlands, Alejandro Loayza Grisi brings home the all-too-real perils of climate change in his country and around the world. But “Utama” (“Our Home”) is also an enduring love story, played by real-life couple Jose Calcina and Luisa Quispe, who’ve been married for 48 years.

“Utama,” which world premieres Jan. 22 at Sundance’s World Dramatic Competition section, is the fiction feature debut of Loayza Grisi, who credits his work in still photography and documentaries for the precise framing of the film’s stunning, otherworldly landscapes and moving character portraiture. It was while traveling around Bolivia as a Dp for the documentary series “Planet Bolivia” where he saw first-hand how the rural communities’ way of life — some just outside the main cities — was being threatened by the extreme changes in the climate.

“Utama...

Condor Entertainment acquires French rights

Paris-based Alpha Violet has picked up worldwide sales rights excluding Bolivia and Uruguay to Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s anticipated Utama and will show footage at the virtual Cannes market next month.

The sales agent has licensed French rights on the Bolivia/Uruguay drama to Condor Distribution, whose slate includes Quo Vadis, Aida?, and First Cow. Buyers have been tracking the Alma Films production since it won three key awards at Films In Progress 39 in Toulouse earlier this year.

Currently in post, Utama is expected to land prestige festival slots this year and is set against...