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This film offers a choral portrait of a handful of characters who live in a remote little town at the arid mountains of La Rioja, northwest Argentina. The common theme, though quite subtle, is the meddling of politics in their traditional way of life -most of the scenes take place against the background of the upcoming elections. Unlike the common take on this subject in recent Argentine documentaries, this film's approach is never direct, dogmatic or moralizing -despite some bizarre scenes of the election campaign, or an even more bizarre, albeit unsettling, scene of election fraud-, but remains strictly respectful to the characters' everyday concerns, reflexions and, above all, sense of humor. It provides an authentic insight on the way politics work in Argentina's "deep inlands". The cinematography is excellent; beyond the easily breathtaking sceneries, it shines in the intimate portraits, indoors and nocturnal scenes. The music keeps good company to those warm and introspective images -suitable enough, at times recalling Ry Cooder's scraped guitars for "Paris, Texas": this is, as well, a film about timeless and forgotten places and lost characters in search of their identity. Highly recommended.

First of all, I'm an amateur of the genre: I watch dozens of horror films a year. It is quite a frustrating habit: very rarely you run into something remotely satisfying, and even more rarely into something that actually scares you. But this has been a very good year so far: first I found Lake Mungo, now this extraordinary gem. It's hard to say anything about it without spoiling the experience on some level. First of all: forget about what you've read as taglines or synopsis on IMDb: nothing of that will give you a clue of what this film is about. Sex is the least of the matters -and by no means this is, as I read here, a moralist or anti-sex film. Please, don't look for such direct and basic metaphors, this is not a high school class. Also forget about the possible goofs or contradictions pointed out in other reviews: would you look for coherence in David Lynch? or in a nightmare? Same indulgence should apply here. What matters are the images that this film succeeds to create, and that will linger in your mind much afterwards. The film avoids all the usual clichés that were just around the corner: no dilemma about the protagonist being or not being crazy, no romantic sub-plot, no one screaming at the camera all-of-the-sudden, no blood, no violence, no FX. Fiends are people -only very awkward people. The horror here is of the most subtle kind: nothing that you can't avoid by running away or even by walking fast. Three images kept ringing in my head while I watched it: 1) the twin girls at the end of the corridor in The Shining (the cinematography is almost an homage to Kubrick, with visually stunning symmetric shots and striking music), 2) a scene of the underrated Tsukamoto's Nightmare Detective 2 (the film also draws from the bone of Asian horror, leaving aside the already boring girls with hair on their faces -namely, the reference to a urban myth, and a story that takes place exclusively among youngsters), 3) Robert Aickman's story The Fetch. I cannot reveal here the reasons why, but I will tell you this: the fiend here has that slow, inexorable, despairing way of approaching you that horror has in nightmares. This film will be a classic of the genre, and I definitely will be following David Mitchell's efforts from now on.

This is a good documentary film about life in the occupied territories of Gaza and Transjordania; it also includes a short outline of the basic historic facts of the conflict, as well as some –otherwise obvious and self-imposed- ideas on the origin of inter-ethnic violence between Palestina and Israel. As many other documentaries around on the subject, this film does a lot by simply exposing some facts that are evident in Middle East, but rarely reach Western medias. After watching some of these films (made both by independent Israeli film-makers as Mograbi or European as Pilger) you realize that what they show is not at all some "unique footage" got by means of deep research, chance or perseverance, nor the product of a good deal of careful edition: once the crew can make it into the occupied territories (which apparently isn't that easy) they only need to shoot for a while the army checkpoints, the Israeli weapons everywhere, the 8 meters wall built in 2002, the "Jews-only" highways, the devastated lands or the towns destroyed by Israeli bombs to show what the Israeli occupation means. Anyway, the most shocking thing in this film -at least for me- are perhaps not these images, but the interviews to Israeli authorities and common-citizens; it is only then that you get to understand how this situation could happen and persists. Now, one of the reviews here shows exactly that point of view (look around for it). This reviewer tries to contest the whole film by pointing-out two alleged "mistakes" made by Pilger (which would show his total dishonesty about the subject): 1) Israel doesn't have the 4th most powerful army in the world, as Pilger claims; and 2) "Pilger makes the mistake of saying that Israel controlled 78% of the land after the 1948 War of Independence". As for number 1), maybe Israel was actually ranked number 4 for year 2002 (but where? by whom? on which standards?) maybe not: it doesn't matter at all. The only point here is that Israel has an army -and a very strong one, including nuclear weapons- and Palestine doesn't have any army at all, nor big or small – in the touching words of the Israeli that close the film: compared to us, Palestine is a mosquito. As for number 2), I'm afraid Pilger is right: even though Israel was given 55% of Palestine by the ONU in 1947, in the facts they were never restricted to that territory. The war began the next day and after it Israel was occupying 78% of Palestine -throwing out 750.000 Palestinians in the meanwhile, who would become refugees and would grow up to be more than 5.000.000 today. Other than this, the review doesn 't say a thing about what we see in the film. Some of its expressions, though, are in perfect harmony with the shocking opinions that I commented before. For instance, it accuses Pilger of using "Nazi-style tactics". In fact, critics to Israeli politics -even when made by reputed Jew intellectuals as Hannah Arendt- are commonly labeled as "antisemitism" or even –as here- Nazism. Far from it, in this case: the most important voices of the film are precisely those of Israeli Jew citizens who give a different insight on the situation and on the deep causes of violence, and even confess to be ashamed of their government politics against the Palestinians. A second example: this film "goes to discredit the only free democracy in the Middle East", says the reviewer. Leaving aside the military occupied territories of Gaza and Transjordania –which wouldn't be called "a democracy" by the drunkest madman on earth- and focusing on Israel itself, it would be a little funny to call that a sparkling democracy, if we remember that non-Jew Israeli citizens just don't have many of the rights granted to Jew citizens: different access –if any access at all- to land, to jobs and -more dramatically- to Law. Depending on your religious beliefs or political ideology, you may or not agree with this discrimination, you may justify it or not; but what you can not do is to call it a "free democracy", not under any available definition of the term.