Hatzin is a young man between the ages of 12 and 15 assigned by his grandmother to go and collect what is left of his father. A painful bureaucratic procedure: a small metal box holds the parental figure, identified with a faded identity card.

The young boy takes the bus home but sees a man who looks extremely like his father.

Despite the denial of this identity Hatzin obsessively persists in following and spying on him, even risking his own safety.

Confronted with such obstinacy, the man takes him to work with him and brings him into his world where he recruits workers to open new factories in desolate valleys that are sunny in summer and snowy in winter.

The alienation of working realities where minimal human rights have no place accompanies the boy's gaze: a violent system of inhuman prevarications engrosses him in a vortex of extreme violence.

Lorenzo Vigas' Father Trilogy sees its fulfillment in this feature film that plumbs the landscape while deepening the social analysis .

After the 2015 win of the first Golden Lion awarded to a Venezuelan film, Vigas returns with an essential and austere film sculpted by the precociously adult gaze of the very young protagonist to be awarded best debut actor.

The director's technical prowess is perfectly complemented by a stylistic mastery immune to any pathetic yielding. The intense and attentive gaze is perfectly carved to representational minimalism.

The extreme act the boy performs no longer seems a destiny away from his father's, and recovering what remains becomes the only possible choice.

Vigas portrays in three acts what Recalcati calls the " Telemachus complex": the first restless(Los enfantes ninfa olive an), the second murky(Desde allà) the third heartbreaking: the circus of the extraneousness of the moral biological political father becomes a caricature transversally identifiable in most socio-familiar realities.

20-Aug-2023 by Beatrice