Todos tus muertos

Carlos Moreno, who portrayed the overheated and violent absurdity of Colombian urban machismo a couple of years ago in Dog Eat Dog, situated his second film in the Colombian countryside. The story is gruesomely simple: a simple farmer finds an enormous pile of corpses early one Sunday morning in his corn field. Shocked and furious, he reports it to the local authorities, but they have good reasons not to want to acknowledge the affair. You see: it’s election day.
Afraid that a national scandal could take place in their backyard, one that could disrupt the elections, the mayor and the police chief try to deny the affair and shrug it off. But a mountain of corpses doesn’t disappear of its own accord, even in Colombia. And news like that is not easy to keep secret.
Moreno uses this brilliant idea for a worrying allegory about the situation in the countryside of Colombia, which is still plagued by a lengthy civil war. But the lesson can also be applied to many other places where poverty, violence, lawlessness and power politics go hand-in-hand. The aptly surreal and satirical tone, audible on the expressive soundtrack and visible in the beautiful visual inventions, does not get in the way of the thrills. On the contrary.

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