Feliz año!

I was at the Málaga film festival a couple of weeks ago, watching 16 films in three days (very unhealthy). One of the films was Emilio Maillé's Rosario Tijeras, based on a novel about a girl who is a sicario in Medellín. Sicarios are basically street-kids who are paid by mafioso types to do their dirty work for them, i.e. shoot the enemy dead. There is a whole sicario culture in Colombia, which might be one of the reasons why this film has been such a box office hit there. I've seen several films on this subject, including Barbet Schroeder's La virgen de los sicarios,and this is not the best by any means: too much soap opera (and too much, for some, of actress Flora Martínez's (seen above) body: in Mexico, the trailers for the film have run into censorship problems, when of course the real obscenity is in how these young people are being exploited). One 15-minute sequence of the film, though, is memorable, and I'd love to know whether it's real. After Rosario's sicario brother is shot dead, Rosario and his friends take him out for a last wild evening. They steal an open-topped car and ride around the city while he sits in the back seat, a cigarette between his lips, shirt open, sunglasses on, dead. They go to a club where he sits in a chair as a stripper does her thing for him - dead. It's powerful stuff, the most powerful imagery I've seen in a cinema this year. It was my fifth film of the day, and boy did it wake me up. I doubt anything like that could have come out of Europe.

BTW, PdS Blog apologizes for being away too long, and hopes it has not lost you forever.