Cinema
Rodrigo D. No futuro
Víctor Gaviria · 1990
Synopsis
Rodrigo is nineteen and lives in the neighbourhoods clinging to the slopes of Medellín. He wants a drum kit and a punk band; he has neither instrument nor money, and his mother has just died. His friends go down into the city to steal a motorbike, a car, to shoot someone for a fee, then climb back up to hang around. The film moves from one to another: the one who deals, the one who prays, the one who counts the days he has left. Rodrigo looks for his drum kit and time empties out around him.
Context
Shot in 1988 in Medellín, when the city was the deadliest in the world, with boys from the upper neighbourhoods who played their own lives. The director spent months with them, and the dialogue comes from their speech. The final credits are dedicated to the memory of four of them, dead before the age of twenty, so that their images might live at least for the length of an ordinary life. The film was shown at Cannes, which no film from the country had achieved, and it opened the way to a whole manner of filming the country with those who live in it.
Who it is for
Ninety-three minutes, in the Spanish of Medellín, subtitled. The slang is dense and the subtitles are necessary even for a Spanish speaker.
Prizes and reception
The first Colombian film selected for the official selection at Cannes, in 1990, and the starting point of contemporary Colombian cinema; awarded prizes in New York and Havana the same year.