In the shantytowns of Caracas, teenage Aixa finds herself unexpectedly pregnant and trapped between conflicting forces: her grandmother Carmen, young yet matriarchal head of the sprawling family clan, desperately tries to prevent Aixa from repeating the cycle of teenage motherhood that has plagued the women in her house for generations; meanwhile Ramon, the drug-linked young father, more obsessed with the idea of a child than with responsibility, resorts to threats—“If you get rid of the baby, I’ll kill you”—to impose his will. All around Aixa, others believe they know what’s best for her—but the choice of life or death, hope or despair, remains hers alone in a world where survival is the only certainty.
Alongside A Drowning Man, I Signed The Petition, 3 Logical Exits, and A World Not Ours, A Man Returned continues to paint a realistic portrait of the Refugee Crisis that eschews the Western gaze and stereotype. These are real portraits painted by a director with lived experience, cultural connection and an amazing eye for visuals.
How powerful can a story be when it is stripped to the bare essentials of just a room, a handful of people and raw human voice?
Treated like a granter of wishes for those earning out of retelling the same tragedy, Marilyn looks like she's caged in different stages of trauma for us to stare at, instead of someone we’ve finally allowed to rest in peace.
The Noel Diary is about a man who unlocks an old diary containing secrets of the past.
This current year, as well as the past several, has seen a slowly building increase in something the horror genre has required for quite a while in this critic's opinion...originality. I've stated before that I am very hard to please when it comes to this vein of the film industry's offerings, always leaning more towards that which sends chills through my very being in lieu of buckets of blood and gore.
