Synopsis
Yei, an energetic ten-year-old boy, spends his days setting traps for crabs and foraging for gasoline, while trying to keep his desperately ill mother Wanda alive and avoid drunken Alicio who lives with them.
2018 Directed by Sebastián Silva
Yei, an energetic ten-year-old boy, spends his days setting traps for crabs and foraging for gasoline, while trying to keep his desperately ill mother Wanda alive and avoid drunken Alicio who lives with them.
Le Pierre Theater, Telluride Film Festival
The audience I saw it with were the first people to ever see it, which would be cool if this movie wasn’t awful. My first foray into the cinema of Sebastián Silva and I am not impressed. This is poorly made and says nothing about the crisis in Puerto Rico. A rip off of Shape of Water in a lot of ways, except no fish fucking, right down to the score.
gracias a mi rey sebastian silva por enviarme el link a esta peli por dm🙏 me gustó muchísimo. enseña una cara de puerto rico que nunca sale en el cine.
I continue to be blown away by Silva’s thematic ambition and willingness to sneak grim, heady subject matter inside Trojan horses of various stripes. FISTFUL OF DIRT isn’t quite the formal tour de force that MAGIC MAGIC was, but it’s even more bracing: a fairy tale about a Puerto Rican boy who discovers a mermaid in a lagoon in the aftermath of Hurricane Maria, leading him, his mother, and his quasi-guardian to all pin their hopes on the creature in very different ways. For a while, Silva’s usual easygoing looseness comes through, but his thorniness and rough edges seem to have been sanded away in favor of a touching but standard-issue story about a plucky young boy languishing in poverty…