Features

Virus Tropical

Santiago Caicedo
Kolumbien 2017
96 min
V'18

While some animation films tend to be effervescent, in line with Japanese studios, like Ghibli, VIRUS TROPICAL is their precise opposite. With streamlined silhouettes – lithe black-and-white figures with sculptural, flinty features – it is unsentimental, darkly comic, even grotesque. Santiago Caicedo adapts the graphic novel by cartoonist Paola Gaviri (penname Powerpaola), who is also in charge of art direction. The film is told in the voice of Paola, as she traces her family’s cultural adaptation when they move from Ecuador to Colombia. Sisters Paola and older Patty and Claudia know from an early age that love is rife with disappointments. They find support in their strong-willed, resourceful mother, who faces overbearing in- laws and an unraveling marriage. Luscious forests surround smoke-choked Quito and then Cali, but the film’s stark drawings neutralize the picturesque and the exotic, to instead bring out a scrappy urban look. In the end, we are reminded that there is no such thing as a “tropical virus.” Unless you count being born, or being born a female, as a hereditary handicap – a fit irony for this tongue- in-cheek tale of defiant women born into a commonplace patriarchal setting. (Ela Bittencourt)

Credits
  • María Cecilia Sánchez - Paola, voice as an adolescent
  • Martina Toro - Paola, voice as a child
  • Alejandra Borrero - Hilda, voice
  • Diego León Hoyos - Uriel, voice
  • Camila Valenzuela - Claudia, voice
  • Javiera Valenzuela - Chavela, voice
  • Zoraida Duque - Grandmother, voice
  • Enrique Lozano
  • Paola Gaviria
  • Simón Hernández
  • Jorge Vallejo
  • Santiago Caicedo
  • Simón Hernández
  • Jorge Vallejo
  • Santiago Caicedo
  • Adriana García Galán
Timbo Estudio, Ikki Films

Stray Dogs

DCP
bw
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