Zona Franca

Zona Franca, a rather run-down tourist showcase, is Patagonia’s biggest shopping mall sited in Chile’s Magallanes Province. Georgi Lazarevski begins with magnificent landscapes to introduce us to this long-unconquered region of the New World. Yet, the framing reveals something other than this beauty – perhaps the anxiety of living there isolated, like Gaspar, a gold-digger who struggles to make ends meet. The story interlaces the life of this piquiñero, of Patricia, the mall’s security guard stuck in her sentry box, and of Edgardo, a politically active trucker. The quality of listening gives Gaspar and Edgardo the time to exist as men with dreams – Gaspar dreams of the love he has never found, Edgardo of his father’s boat, sold in a time of need. When the local inhabitants block the roads to protest against the rising gas prices, the tourist bubble pops. The “Highway to the End of the World” then takes on a literal meaning for the foreigners who are stuck there. Edgardo’s poignant feeling of guilt during the demonstrations harks back to an old wound, and to the still sensitive scars left by colonialism on an entire region that has too hastily confined its history to museums. The really splendid sequence when he visits a luxury hotel that was formerly a slaughterhouse where he worked as a youth undidactically reveals the violent nature of current upheavals. (Charlotte Garson)