Cinema
Largo viaje
Patricio Kaulen · 1967
Synopsis
After a wake for an “angelito”, the celebration that peasant tradition holds for a dead infant, the father must carry the small body to the cemetery on a crowded bus. The elder brother, an eight-year-old boy according to Guadi Calvo, finds the baby's cardboard wings among the remains of the celebration and, convinced that without them his brother will not be able to go up to heaven, sets off across Santiago to give them back to him. He crosses the poor districts, from Plaza Bulnes to the Cementerio General, in a city that critics describe as hostile and dark, almost without help from passers-by.
Context
Performed notably by one of the director's sons, Enrique, and by popular singers, the film received in 1968 at the Karlovy Vary festival a special jury prize, the jury being chaired by Cesare Zavattini, reports Guadi Calvo. Radio Universidad de Chile regards it as a direct forerunner of the new Chilean cinema, marked by Italian neorealism, and notes the almost documentary tone with which it shows the wake of the angelito; Calvo ranks it, with El chacal de Nahueltoro, among the high points of the country's cinema. The Cineteca Nacional screened it for its fiftieth anniversary.
Who it is for
A film of about eighty minutes, with an almost documentary tone; no French or English version is attested.
Prizes and reception
A special prize at Karlovy Vary in 1968, and a place as a precursor in the renewal of the sixties.
Sources for this page 4
The pages consulted to check this page.