La Extranjera by Fernando Diaz

What was supposed to be a brief trip to arrange the paper work in Indio Muerto, becomes a journey to discover herself and give meaning to her existence in the solitude of the farm. Maria is a woman of few words, on the verge of being rude, and we never get to know much about her past or what is going on in her mind.

But she begins to have projects. Nobody understands them but one wealthy man from Buenos Aires who has also been attracted by the farm life. “I have confused folklore with misery” he recognises. The phrase is eloquent of the Latin American reality viewed by outsiders’ eyes.

Even if the film is not explicitly about poverty, it is something that you can breathe through images of dryness and oldness of every single object that appears on the screen. Latin American cinema has demonstrated over the last years to be unique in telling individual stories that are very rich and caring in details. But La Extranjera has something new: beside the personal story, Fernando Diaz’s film is a collective calling to development and to change the course of time.

Caroline Mercado