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The Venezuelan living in Mexico Lorenzo Vigas tells that there may be a link between social and political phenomena such as

Chavismo, Peronism or, in general, any Ibero-American messianism (including 'Maradonism')

and the number of orphans that populate a territory with almost 700 million inhabitants. And to make his theory clear, he presents

'La caja',

a delicate and almost silent study of the gaze of a child without a father. It sounds melodramatic and, indeed, it is. In addition to transparent in its rawness.

The whole film is kept in tension about the desire (or just anguish) of a child who searches for his father among the remains of a mass grave. And he finds it. Or so they say.

She extends her hands and in them, the official places a box of bones.

With it, the card that identifies the victim of who knows what killing. And so on until one day he thinks he has discovered, suddenly and truly, the one who was his father, but alive and embodied in a man dedicated to collecting people for their exploitation in the textile factories.

Let's say that the film is composed from the detail, from the certainty of each of the doubts that stop the young protagonist in front of an elementally uncertain time. Far from the tremendous exhibitionism in which perhaps all too often every project from those lands is used to cover up,

Vigas chooses to stop the camera at eye level, always attentive to what shines on the other side.

Only in this way, with tact and respecting safe and prudent distances, 'La caja' manages to avoid the always critical moment of the anecdote. And in this way it acquires at times the depth and verve of a general aesthetic theory of orphanhood.

The director returns to the Lido after he won a controversial Golden Lion in 2015 at the hands of precisely the same

Michel Franco

who presented '

Sundown

' on

Sunday

as producer, with a script by

Guillermo Arriaga

and with the Chilean actor

Alfredo Castro

as a lighthouse. The latter embodied the protagonist of '

From there',

a story that spoke of silences, dark pasts and perhaps impossible futures. It was just another piece of perfectly recognizable cinematography.

The problem with that film, despite sharing with it its careful construction out of the field (that is, from behind the screen, from the side where the real drama inhabits), was that the scheme of a perfectly identifiable cinema was too heavy. way of offering itself as a pure gesture, even mania.

It was a cinema designed practically for festivals and that as such it behaved: with an obvious, clumsy and deceitful arrogance.

This time, Vigas abandons the most stale of that well-worn writing to focus on what matters.

Far from looking for the murky for the murky, '

The box'

manages to review the entire scale of crimes that humanity is capable of without barely disheveled, letting the indignation run inside.

From femicide to exploitation to murder with impunity, everything is summoned in a silent and uncomfortable coven

of lies that call for lies, of lies that lie.

And at the center, orphanhood not only as a key to understanding the sociology and history of an entire continent but as

the best possible definition of horror.

We have arrived.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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