The 26th Festival of Cinema of Africa, Asia, and Latin America ends and the winners are known, but the questions for humanity remain
The Thin Yellow Line (La delgada linea amarilla, 2015), the first feature film by Mexican director Celso R. Garcia won the Audience of Milan Prize and a special mention of the Jury at The 26th Festival of Cinema of Africa, Asia and Latin America which ended tonight with the awards ceremony in Milan.
The yellow line in the middle of the road is the iconic sign of a road movie. As in films such as Easy Rider (Dennis Hopper, 1969), Paris, Texas (Wim Wenders, 1984) and My Own Private Idaho (Gus Van Sant, 1991), it points to the strong connection between the road and the cinema, as two spectacles of moving images, and in the terms of the predicament between physical and imaginary, between immobility of the body and unlimited potentials of the fantasy. This minimalist road movie, located exclusively on the road and immediate surroundings, narrates about five men who take a job of painting the line in the middle of a road between two towns in rural Mexico. The road is the place to face the issues of identity. The power of The Thin Yellow Line is that it connects a cultural game of identities with a raw fight for survival. As they paint the line along two hundred kilometers, each protagonist undergoes a change, motivated by the pure physical existence and questioning its conditions, including the conditions of being a human. The one who joined the group because in his previous job he was replaced by a dog, finally regains the trust in humanity, but as the most human among the film protagonists dies, the ones who remain, in the story, and in the cinema hall, are left with more questions than answers. This might be one of the main reasons why the movie won 14 international prizes in the few months after its release and the young director is already working on a new film, a Mexican – U.S. coproduction.
Other winners of the 26th Festival are, ex aequo, films Madame Courage by Merzak Allouache (Algeria, France, 2015) and We’ve Never Been Kids by Mahmood Soliman (Egipt, Arab Emirates, Qatar, Lebanon, 2015) as the best Feature films Windows of the world, The Mocked One by Lemohang Jeremia Mosese (Lesotho, 2015) as the best African short film, and Dustur by Marco Santarelli (Italy, 2015) as the winner of the special prize Extr’A – Razzismo Brutta Storia.
(The reviews of other films will be published later this week).