La casa (2009) User Reviews

La Casa by Tayo Cortes

[tayo-30359 · 10/10 · 13 September 2020]

Victor Mendez has lived with his mother on the outskirts of the Columbian capital of Bogotá for 40 years, in the middle of the forest but on illegal ground, in a makeshift wooden cabin. They could be driven out any time. Ever since his new wife, of whom his mother disapprovers strongly, has moven in, quarrels have dominated their daily life. It is strenuous making a living collecting garbage, rolling tons through the streets, digging in the dirt. Still, Victor Mendez simply will not give up. Every day he and his miserable donkeys transport his booty up and down the hill. A cycle which is literally a waiting loop. Filmmaker Tayo Cortés took a lot of time to study these conditions. Poverty is never the same, poverty is always individual. Mendez was born into these conditions and has had nothing but bad luck. Cortés's camera continuously follows him at work, it becomes part of his daily life, entering deeper and deeper into the entangled relationships within this ominous ménage à trois. Poverty hardens the heart. Their interdependence has become contempt. The film records this modern-day Sisyphos with a formidable and radical consequence. The only thing left for Mendez in all this desolation is dreams. At least they are free. CK

THE CHARM OF A DISCREET TALENT

[tayo1978 · 10/10 · 31 October 2022]

I first met Tayo Cortés in 2002 when preparing my third fiction shortfilm. I was lucky I had him as a cameraman when everything around me seemed to be ruined during the shooting. Because Cortés is the kind of professional that you wish by your side in a chaotic situation: he is calm and silent, a source of balance in the middle of confusion. And the most important thing, his intellicence is always orientated towards ideas, not towards the satisfaction of his own ego. A rather strange phenomenon in the current cinema.

Consequently, it was not a surprise for me to verify what Cortés had obtained with The house, his first documentary as a director. In this work we find many of his basic qualities as a creator and as an individual: prudence, integrity, observation, respect. In addition, if we talk about specifically technical skills, Cortés is an extremely well prepared filmmaker. In The house, by showing us the daily life of a recyclers family of Bogotá (Colombia), he bravely faces with the eternal problem of survival of human dreams in the middle of an atrocious context. The result is that his modest but proud handcrafted piece of cinema contains more inner search than ninety per cent of the documentary cinema of today. And, what is more meritorious for a young director, due to his ability to find and work with unforgettable human beings (there is no doubt that Víctor Méndez is a classic, timeless character) Cortés' eye captures in his very first work a couple of moments of such intensity and truth that many authors can not even imagine to get in their entire career.

Fran Jurado, journalist and filmmaker.