Rodrigo Plá | Uruguay, Mexico, France | 2012 | 84’ | In Spanish | English subtitles
Uruguayan-Mexican director Rodrigo Plá read in the papers that an increasing number of people are no longer able to take care of their elderly parents; an alarming but also understandable development which inspired him and his wife, script writer Laura Santullo, to shoot La demora.
Life of single mother Maria is not easy: she lives in a tiny apartment in Montevideo, can hardly make ends meet with the little money she earns as a seamstress, and has to support her three school-age children as well as her 80-year-old father Agustin. He is becoming quite a burden given his increasing forgetfulness, his incontinence and his tendency to go AWOL and get lost in the city. One day she takes a radical decision: she leaves him sitting on a bench in a distant park, hoping the police will turn up and find him a home. Turn up they do, but Agustin refuses to go with them and stubbornly keeps waiting for his daughter. She is by now racked with guilt.
Due to the excellent script, convincing camera work with many extreme close-ups and superb acting, particularly by Roxana Blanco (Maria) and Carlos Vallarino (Agustin), this film is a beautiful, subtle and balanced family drama. In 2012 awarded at the Berlinale and also winner of the first prize at the Latin American Film Festival.
Screenings:
SAT 11 AUG - 17:00 |
THU 16 AUG - 17:00 |
