Juan Carlos Valdivia / 108 min. / Bolivia
La Paz’s Zona Sur neighborhood is Bolivia’s most exclusive enclave and has housed the country’s affluent elite for generations. Here, in an adobe-tile-roofed castle, a statuesque matriarch reigns over her spoiled offspring and indigenous servants. Social change, however unwelcome, is on its way. As the mother squabbles with her self-indulgent, oversexed teenage son and clashes with her petulant daughter, her 6-year-old boy wanders the rooftops unsupervised. The scent of impending decline permeates the air, and the threat of aristocratic privileges quickly changing hands heralds a new era in a seemingly interminable class war. Bolivia’s official entry for the Academy® Awards foreign-language film race, this searing portrait of a patrician family in flux eloquently chronicles their final days during a time of intense social change and cogently exposes the bubble of decadence in which they exist.
Film is subtitled in English.
