The Quispe Girls (2013)

I hope Sebastián Sepúlveda's The Quispe Girls will be widely seen as it is a stunningly beautiful, well-directed and subtly political film with an important topic. The film chronicles the daily life of the three Quispe sisters who live in the mountains, far from neighbors and villages. They toil, they rest, they talk and sometimes they tell stories. The wind howls and the dust swirls: an endless, desolate world, a color scale of grays and blacks and browns. A salesman comes by with news from the world. People are abandoning their homes, selling off their animals. We understand that this is related to Pinochet's military regime.

Daily life is the core of the film. The sisters herd goat and collect charcoal. Sometimes we just see them work. Conversations are stripped to the bare, but all lines are very expressive, but without seeming overly so. The lines exchanged bear witness of lives spent together, shared experiences only hinted at in the film (there was a fourth sister). The oldest sister takes the lead, sometimes sternly bossing the other two around. A fugitive asks the sister for advice about how to pass the country border. His character grounds the story in the historical events, but all of this is kept low-key. At some point, I was worried that the introduction of this man had the sole purpose of pointing to the sexual yearnings of one of the sister, but my worries were at least partly unfounded. Sepúlveda lets nature play a big part. The settings are majestic, but there is still a roughness to the images that prevents them from ending up as National Geographic-like eye candy. And well - there's nothing in the story that would invite an escapist fantasy about the purity of nature. This is gruff, harsh material; the sisters have always led an isolated life but their existence becomes unbearable. There are no people left to buy their cheese. The film has an almost apocalyptic feel. Indeed, it is a world that we see ending and there is no trace of sentimentality or curious sensationalism in how the harsh fate of the Quispe siblings is rendered. The Quispe Girls is, one could say, a film both passionate and restrained.