Colombia, Medellin, shantytown.

Amparo, is nineteen years old, and is taken in by her sister after escaping from a convent.

She is ogled by Libardo, a 30-year-old neighborhood boss, famous for criminal acts of all kinds.

He kidnaps her, rapes her and makes her his wife/slave, constantly beaten, raped and insulted in public.

Costei becomes pregnant and the living conditions in which she finds herself force her to rely on the "protection" of the Animal, that Libardo Ramirez whose story is told.

Amparo is unable to get help even from her sincere sister; everyone in the ruthless neighborhood is terrified by the violence of the Animal's gang, which only emits insults and grunts while her mother, along with other women, seems to be conniving in it.

For the others, too, it seems normal for the man on duty to commit rape of young, virgin prey; in the labyrinth of the slum, the Minotaur needs sacrificial victims.

Violence is elevated to a normative system, and the Animal's other son must also be raised by Amparo and snatched from the hands of his natural mother.

Cutting her hair will be the only way for her not to be dragged out in public, while, barely without food and provisions of any kind, she will have to live in a tin shack where she will also raise a child not her own.

A disturbing to shocking odyssey of extreme overpowering against women, who are often accomplices and witnesses, is the ordeal experienced by this victim condemned to wait for a liberating catharsis.

The Animal's accomplices do not hesitate to hold his women while he rapes them because the law of homo feminae lupus is hormonal.

The ghetto that houses this humanity has no regulatory plans, let alone rules of any kind.

In a climate of ruthless sexism, in a definitively degraded community only one rule is provided for: silent terror as the only glue.

Only raw and vicious neorealism could tell a true story, a real horror that takes place between 1975 and 1982.

In those areas, where even the most infamous narco-trafficker Escobar was born, in that part of Medellin called Rionegra, it seems that things are changing but the protagonist's testimony confirms that even today in her country, men are born free while women are not, still segregated as wives/mothers, unable to work and living in fear of denouncing the abuse they suffer.

Victor Gaviria, tells this story in a dry and extremely essential way.

The lacerating semi-documentary realism portrayed is most effective, the actors taken from the street seem like the best interpreters of themselves.

The slums of a humanity living in sheet metal is not filtered in any way and the disturbance is deafening.

The raw and vicious story brutally portrays the most classic of dynamics between man and woman where the former is the animal and the latter the prey oppressed even by the lack of female solidarity.

It is not difficult to understand that the oppressed, the enslaved, the marginalized, the "different," women, do not feel, for those who share their condition, any solidarity, but only contempt, antagonism, envy, rivalry.

The oppressed often unaware of their condition, are all out to gain the approval of those who are stronger than them and try, in order to please and be chosen, or just not to be preyed upon, to impose the claim of being different from others, that is, better.

Only consciousness-raising can allow a glimpse of redemption: and this is not lacking in Amparo, present to herself from the beginning of her barbaric story until it makes her the only true final protagonist.

A film that nails, lacerates, rapes, insults those who do not take on the reality of the facts, those who do not take on a story that really happened a few years ago, as many still do today.

A rough film about the crude and atavistic sexism that is dysfunctional for a society that claims to be civilized; a film about the primal and at times incomprehensible self-preservation instinct of the oppressed.

A dirty film for those who do not want to see, repetitive for those who do not want to hear, anachronistic for those who do not want to be made uncomfortable.

A film that shocks and presses with a haunting rhythm the viewer who attempts to evade reality through fiction.

There is no escaping this film, no one can do so and every attempt is vain and cowardly.

27-Jun-2023 by Beatrice