Cinema
Allá en el trapiche
Roberto Saa Silva · 1943
Synopsis
The daughter of a hacienda owner returns from the United States, where her father had sent her to study, and brings back with her a suitor from there. To pay for this trip, the father has mortgaged the land, and he has told no one. Around the cane mill, the day labourers keep on cutting and singing, and the foreign fiancé discovers a country he does not understand. The young woman must choose between what she was taught over there and what she finds here.
Context
Produced by Ducrane Films, the company of Oswaldo Duperly, which had begun in 1939 with advertisements and newsreels. Shown at a private screening in Bogotá on 22 March 1943, then at the Faenza theatre on 8 April. The film is a deliberate attempt to repeat the success of a highly successful Mexican comedy, whose title and formula it takes up: songs, a hacienda, thwarted loves. It was the first real public success of Colombian sound cinema, which allowed the company to become a joint-stock company and the industry to live a few months longer. Fifty-nine minutes of it survive out of eighty-five.
Who it is for
Originally eighty-five minutes, in Spanish; fifty-nine remain. A rural musical comedy, with the tunes and types of the Colombian countryside of the forties.
Prizes and reception
The first popular success of Colombian sound cinema, together with another film from the same production company.