Sanctorum (2019) Poster

(II) (2019)

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7/10
"We come to soothe the memory of humanity."
morrison-dylan-fan20 March 2021
Warning: Spoilers
When checking for details about the films on at the WOW Film Festival,I was intrigued by the report from Variety about this title mixing harsh reality with fantasy, which led to me getting ready to witness it from the sky.

View on the film:

Bellowing from the Heavens, composer Galo Duran descends co-editor/(with Yibran Asuad & Leon Felipe Gonzalez) co-cinematographer /(with Mateo Guzman)writer/directing auteur Joshua Gil crane shot from surreal Heaven to the warfare on Earth,with a magnificent Shoegaze score.

Duran's score brings out a strikingly heightened surrealism to the Fantasy sequences, grinding down to a lone,echoing shudder across the war-torn land.

Taking over a year to build the sound design with sound designer/supervising sound editor Sergio Diaz, Gil continues his examinations of the violence from the drug-trade in Mexico, with an enchanting, earthy Magical Realism, via long tracking shots following a box go deep into the dark woods to ask the sky, the wind and the water to bring his mum back, which Gil answers with a lightning bolt of primary colour across the screen,as nature answers the calls.

Made mostly in the indigenous language of Mije with non-professional actors in Oaxaca and Bolivia's Salar de Uyuni salt flats, Gil weaves the sparks of the fantastical with the stark reality of violence on the ground, holding back from lapping up the gore,to instead hold on stilted wide-shots gazing down from the Heavens of nature at the flashes of gunfire being ignited on Earth.
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8/10
Angels of fire on judgement day
olon-5570210 September 2021
Figuratively beautiful, this film seems to hint at a kind of doomsday for a humanity that is all about violence, hatred and oppression. In a beautiful mountain landscape perpetually bathed in fog, the inhabitants of a village work for drug traffickers cultivating their plantations. They are forced to work for little and are ordered around by terror. Some of them are killed and the government military blames the villagers for the massacre. In this situation of hopeless grief, the young son of one of the murdered women sets off at night into the forest in search of his mother. Two small black dogs accompany him. Disturbing noises are heard coming from a cave or from the mountain, like the dark sound of a bell. And while the child, who is crying with fear, is enveloped by small lights, like guiding spirits, some very strange beings are gathered in the cave for a conversation: they are fiery human outlines that, like angels of death, come out into the woods and move towards the armed soldiers. In the meantime, a storm breaks out in the sky, fierce lightning strikes the vault of heaven and crazed clouds overlap and chase each other.

A powerful and evocative film that seems to suggest that God, Nature or, in any case, a Higher Power, fed up with the abuses of this humanity, intends to destroy it. Congratulations to the makers for a film that remains impressed in the mind and soul.
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