Films & Schedules - D

Dawson, Isla 10 focuses on the imprisonment of advisors close to the deposed socialist government of president Salvador Allende. The men were jailed and endured hellish conditions on the island, the world's southernmost concentration camp, for more than a year.

After the military coup in 1973, deposed President Salvador Allende’s closest collaborators and ministers were locked up in a concentration camp on Dawson Island, lying at the western entrance to the Strait of Magellan. They are assigned numbers instead of names. Their lives are spared thanks to pressure from the International Red Cross, but they are not spared from torture and forced labor. Thirty years later, some survivors return to the island and rediscover the place where they learned to survive in such extreme conditions. Miguel Littin, who spent many years living in exile and to whom writer Gabriel Garcia Marquez dedicated his book “Clandestine in Chile: The Adventures of Miguel Littin,” took inspiration for his drama from the autobiography by Sergio Bitar, one of Allende’s ministers.

Filmography: The Promised Land (71), Letter From Marusia (76), Alsino and the Condor (82), The Shipwreck (94), The Last Man (05).

This year’s Chilean submission for the Best Foreign Language Film Oscar.

117 Minutes    

Interests: Oscar Submissions, Narrative Feature, Spanish Language, History.

Father and son gangsters freshly released from prison must keep their criminal enterprise afloat while trying to figure out who ratted them out. Was it Bill's wife or their despised family "friend"? Anyone is a suspect in this blackly comic piece of criminal realism.

Ken Loach meets “The Sopranos” might characterize this darkly comic and sometimes disturbing slice of social surrealism in which a family of dysfunctional crooks tries to keep their criminal enterprise from falling apart. As soon as Bill (Bob Hill) and his son Karl (Rob Hill) are released from jail, they try to figure out who ratted them out to the police. Bill’s partner (Julia Deakin) seems like your average housewife, but there’s something about her that suggests she may have had a hand in it. It soon becomes evident that this ordinary terraced house is packed to the rafters with gangsters. Among others, we meet a despised family “friend” (Tony Way), a hit man (Michael Smiley) who takes his toddler along on jobs, Karl’s pregnant girlfriend (Kali Peacock), and a nasty piece of work named Eric (David Schaal). Paranoia reigns supreme in this house, where everyone is suspicious of everyone else.

First Feature Film.

Winner of the Best Feature Prize at Fantastic Fest.

89 Minutes     Digital    

Interests: New Directors, Narrative Feature, Comedy.