These Movies Explore Lima and Medellín Through the Lives of Young People

Our eighth newsletter comes from movie critic Alejandro Riera. This week, he heads to the streets of Lima and Medellín, where young people navigate neighborhoods shaped by gangs, music, graffiti, and violence. Together, these movies paint a portrait of urban youth finding moments of connection and self-expression in places that rarely make life easy.

Alejandro recommends a feature now playing in theaters, another to stream at home, and takes a deep dive into "Barrio Triste," Stillz's blistering debut about Medellín's lost youth. He places the production within a long tradition of movies that have chronicled one of Colombia's most mythologized cities.

Happy Watching,

— Vanessa

Winner of the Best Film and Best Director at last year’s Lima Film Festival and of the Genre Section Award at the 40th Guadalajara International Film Festival, Germán Tejada’s feature debut focuses on a sensitive 14-year-old properly nicknamed Cara de Ángel who, to prove his masculinity in the rough streets of Lima, Perú, must choose between two worlds: that of the gang he becomes involved with and the city’s punk music scene with its own cultural and sexual codes.

Playing July 24 and 26 across various cities in Florida.

In Catalina Arroyave Restrepo’s feature debut, the daughter of a reporter, Cristina (Laura Tobón), is forced into exile after receiving death threats from a local street gang and spends far more time in the streets of Medellín painting graffiti with future boyfriend Simón (David Escallón) than at home or finishing her degree. She’s far happier leaving her mark on Medellín’s walls with her art even when danger is not far behind. With a vibrant soundtrack featuring the work of a select group of the city’s salsa and hip-hop artists, “Days of the Whale” celebrates the liberating, community-building power of art.

Currently streaming on Hoopla and Pluto.tv.

— By Alejandro Riera

Somewhere in the streets of Barrio Triste, Medellín, sometime in the 80s, a reporter and cameraman prepare to shoot a news piece (whether taped or live, it’s not quite clear) about strange lights falling from the sky, followed by a metallic sound neighbors claim to have seen and heard. Strange happenings that may or may not be true and may or may not be linked to the increasing number of teen disappearances in the area. We watch the setup from the camera’s point of view, as the cameraman tries to position it. At times we see two young men in the background, leaning against a wall, messing around. Then, a couple more. Suddenly, they rush in, attack both men, and steal the camera. Still rolling, we see quick, jittery glimpses of the sidewalks, street, buildings, electric wires, and the young robbers looking at the camera, whooping it up, high on the rush of adrenaline. One of them even brags about knifing one of the two men.

So begins Stillz’s exhilarating, brutal, at times confounding and sometimes trippy feature debut “Barrio Triste,” produced by Harmony Korine’s production company EDGLRD. It’s the latest in a decades-long run of movies about Medellín’s lost youth that includes “Rodrigo D: No Future,” (“Rodrigo D: no futuro, 1990) and “The Rose Seller” (“La vendedora de rosas,” 1998), Barbet Schroeder’s “Our Lady of the Assassins” (“La virgen de los sicarios”, 2001, and, more recently, Laura Mora Ortega’s equally phantasmagoric “The Kings of the World” (“Los reyes del mundo,” 2022). Mora Ortega’s and Stillz’s projects could even be seen as companion films given their turn into the oneiric and surreal halfway through. But while the young men’s journey to reclaim what was once theirs in Mora’s feature takes them deeper into the heart of Colombia, for the young men in “Barrio Triste” there is no escaping the streets of el barrio.

After the robbery, the four teens who stole the camera (still rolling) debate what to do with it. They know it’s now a hot item and selling it could get them into trouble. One of them keeps the camera and starts to record whatever comes to mind, including the violent robbery of a jewelry store. As they drive down the pothole-filled roads of their neighborhood to the city, the camera, in a long extended take, pans around the interior of the car, through the windshield (showing us a Mercedes Benz hood ornament), the side windows and then back inside as the now gang of five put on masks and pull out guns from a bag while, on the radio, a man confesses on a local talk show to being a serial killer who gets off on killing prostitutes. You would expect that, with a set-up like this one, “Barrio Triste” would follow a more conventional narrative route where the gang faces the consequences of their actions. Not Stillz. He is after something more crude and, at the same time, ethereal and mysterious.