Outside, the white snow blankets everything, blurring into the white of the sky, the bare brown trees like stitches binding them together. Inside the Victorian sandstone house which looks distinctly out of place here, everything is darkness, old wood, sepia and soot. The only item to recall the snow is the bright white wedding dress enfolding the small body of a girl who is, at most, 12 years old. This is Sara (Esther Vega Pérez Torres), whose much older groom, landowner Mr Porter, casts a shadow over everything yet is never seen. Visiting Tierra del Fuego to photograph her in her gown, Pedro (Alfredo Castro) tugs it down off her shoulders as he gets her to pose. “He’ll like it better that way,” he explains. He doesn't yet seem uncaring, but it’s his first step down a very dark road.
Sara’s path is quiet, removed. In one scene we see her.
Sara’s path is quiet, removed. In one scene we see her.
- 12/9/2021
- by Jennie Kermode
- eyeforfilm.co.uk
Traveling photographer Pedro is a drawn, taciturn type, who prefers to let his camera do the talking. Whether he’s shooting a coy bride or a gang of white huntsmen posing with their Indigenous human kill, his mien is impassive, his brow furrowed, seeking composed perfection in the most rattling of images. “White on White” likewise conjures ravishing beauty from hellish historical ugliness, though it’s mindful throughout of the camera’s conspiratorial capacity for violence. As cold and quiet and witchily mesmerizing as a nighttime snowfall, Spanish-Chilean director Théo Court’s formidable second feature considers a devastating chapter of South America’s colonialist history through the eyes of someone at once a perpetrator and an observer — tacitly asking, at a certain point, what the difference even is.
An arresting and subtly challenging Chilean submission for the international feature Oscar, “White on White” first popped on the festival circuit in...
An arresting and subtly challenging Chilean submission for the international feature Oscar, “White on White” first popped on the festival circuit in...
- 12/7/2021
- by Guy Lodge
- Variety Film + TV
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