SXSW Film Review: Monte Adentro

Two brothers – city mouse, country mouse – work long hours with low pay and even less complaint. Their mother, the matriarch of a muleteer family, narrates this family portrait turned observation on hard work and changing times.

Novier stays in the lush Caldas mountainside, caring for the family home (a character itself) and carrying on the generations-old tradition of employing a small team of (adorable, stubborn) mules to haul loads throughout the rural countryside. Alonso works hard in the city tending to the soles of shoes, and checking on their aging mother who’s taken up apartment living per doctors orders. Modern technology and the steadily expanding urban sprawl mean a decline in age-old professions like driving mules and cobbling shoes. Still, the men work.

Whistles and hand gestures outnumber words, and at first it’s more tedium than progress that counts here, a sentiment initially reflected in the film’s pacing. Once the brothers join forces to complete a big move up a seriously steep mountain, the film really engages and explores a fascinatingly simple story. Director Nicolás Macario Alonso’s strongest cinematic skills are in gorgeous, wide-shot pans of a mountaintop’s razor edge and in contrasting frames of busy people and creatures – all reminiscent of snapshots in an album of life.

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Monte Adentro

SXGlobal
Saturday, March 21, 10pm, Marchesa

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