The South of a Passion

The young Susan seems doomed to a life of toil. She lives with her faither in a lodging house and together they earn their living by dancing as a tango couple in a seedy nightclub. Since mother left them, the two have had an incestuous relationship. Father is on the booze. When his alcoholism eventually lands him in jail, Susan decides to become a prostitute: it is the only way she can earn enough money to get her father out of jail. She meets another prostitute, Lili, who personifies everything that Susan is afraid of: physical decay and failure. Despite this fear, a bond develops between the two women. When Susan gets an influential lover, it looks as if she will be able to escape her sad existance. But her past continues to haunt her.El sur de una pasion, the feature début by Cristina Fasulino, is imbued with the rhythm, the cadance and the tone of the tango: introvert and capricious. It is a dark film, in which the tragedy of the people wrestling with their lives is accentuated by a setting of stuffy back rooms, murky staircases and scruffy nightclubs. Born by a passion and desire so characteristic of the tango, El sur de una pasion also sketches an accurate picture of traditional Latin-American life in which men have to be macho and women must be whores.