29/38
A young girl’s gift for narrating events from Hollywood movies recreates the fate of her family in rural Chile in the 1960s. The comedy From Here to Eternity (1953). Seen at the Toronto International Film Festival, this film is both an homage to the American western and an exploration of the power of cinema and storytelling to transform lives. In Spanish with subtitles, the characters are drawn from life, and a pretty hard life. The community takes place in the “driest place in the world” and is not unhappy. There is plenty of room for tender comedy and young love. The camera moves away from the real violence, but not from the story, which honestly tells the behind-the-scenes story of a town set in a frozen desert for the young woman at the center of the story. The film was shot in an abandoned mining town, which only adds to its universality.