LA TIERRA QUIETA

This family chronicle, set in a rural community in Nicaragua, opens with a surprising shot – a landscape so peacefully beautiful that the only sign of the severe flooding that has devastated it is the enormous head of a statue just visible above the waters. In the day-to-day life of don Sebastian, his wife and their youngest son (the only one of their ten children that has not gone abroad), the comings and goings of their chickens, the pig to be slaughtered and the televised football matches weave a wheel of time detached from history. The umpteenth Sandinist election victory on the news (“We have won again!” Daniel Ortega) seems to reinforce this unchanging cycle bordering on the absurd. Yet, like the opening shots of the floods, the fragment of political life faintly echoed by the radio is one of the rare links with the outside world. The filmmaker’s keen sense of listening and patience give a palpable feel to the tension underlying to the family’s immobility. A large part of the vitality and emotions of Sebastian and his family has been devastated by the centrifugal force of exile. The peacefulness of this land threatens to freeze into a deadly immobility from one moment to the next. (Charlotte Garson)