Cinema: An Act of Faith and Resistance by the Kings of the World

They say that the workers of the Paris Commune walked the streets shooting at clocks as the ultimate symbol of the division of life, of exploitation, of submission. To a large extent, there is a cinema (or an art, in a more general sense) whose greatest endeavor is to destroy timers. It is a resistance cinema devoted not so much to ending time as to giving it meaning. It is subversive and voracious cinema that offers itself in a desperate gesture as a lifeline. It is not cinema that runs through time, rather it is time that becomes visible in it. Things of Tarkovski and, hastening, of The Kings of the worldby Laura Mora, the latest and most flamboyant Golden Shell that San Sebastián has been capable of.

whatever it was director of the intense and even runaway, despite its gaps, Matar a Jess He returns to the same lion’s den with a tale of furious grammar, not only free but volcanic in style. Everything explodes. Now, the form, before only style, is voice; one of the voices, suddenly, most identifiable and characteristic of Ibero-American cinema. The screen is flooded with the delirium typical of dreams with the same anger that is stained with the dust of reality.

Structured like a road movie, the director stops in life due to the desperate force of five kids with no other heritage than their intimate despair. And from there, downhill in an essentially delirious, exalted and, above all, happy film exercise. R, Culebro, Sere, Winny and Nano are street kids from Medellín with names like stones. Or machetes, would be more appropriate. The first of them inherits a land from his grandmother that had been expropriated before and now returned.

The five of them will embark on a journey to the promised land, to their impossible ithaca, whose only argument is the total absence of argument. As in any self-respecting trip, there are no more rules than those that are on fire. What follows is a tale of millennial breath and fever that turns its protagonists into five hard-working Argonauts with dirty hands and faces smeared with mud.. They look for what Jason or the 30 Persian birds (as Borges would say) always looked for: the fleece, the face of the god Simurgh or the possibility of a livable life, always so close to a dignified death.

The Kings of the world It’s not so much a movie, obviously too, like an exhalation. It is a hymn to disobedience that is also a hymn to the need to resist. And in this way, she runs across the screen so convinced of herself, so enthusiastic, so beautiful and so sad, all at the same time, that her ideas are not winning viewers but believers. It is, if you will, an act of faith.

After all, and among so much confusion of screens, platforms and distracted viewers who can’t find a place or place to look, it is fine for a film to be presented with the conviction of a riot, like a cataclysm that summons exaltation as well as rage, joy and silence. A silence without time, an eternal silence to make present the most intimate nature of time itself. No clocks. We have arrived.