Original Title: Stellet licht
Writer/Director: Carlos Reygadas
Year: 2007
Cinematographer: Alexis Zabe
Very good photography and sound design. A stripped down and simply told film, very carefully planned and therefore very impacting, even if you feel a little lost, especially at the end.
A great idea to tell a simple story in a simple setting, using simple characters. The minimalism of the spoken words of the script and the delicate directing pulls out powerfully naturalistic performances. According to the wikipedia page, all the performers are non-actors, they are real Mennonites, which brings up a whole lot of questions for me about how the director got these Mennonites to act so well, and in the case of certain scenes, to act at all!
A beautiful film full of images that pulled me in, mesmerized, like gazing at old impressionistic oil paintings.
The minimal acting is what makes it so emotionally true, and I don't know if that is due to casting actors who just naturally didn't try to act, or through long and hard training to get them to be so stoic in their facial expression of emotions. My hunch is that the director wisely chose people who were going to be stoic on camera whether he wanted that or not, people who just have no concept of hamming it up for the camera. Either way, the direction is clearly brilliant.
Beautiful film made in Mexico and deserves to be recognized along side the great contemporary realist directors from europe like the Dardenne Brothers, and a cinematic poetry like that of Terrence Malick.
Some compare this young mexican director to the likes of Carl Dreyer, Andrei Tarkovsky, Ingmar Bergman, and Robert Bresson. One can certainly feel the connections. This is my first exposure to this director, but I am now eager to catch up with his other work and be on the lookout for anything else that might come from him in the future.
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