Directamente para video

Acto de violencia en una joven periodista (1988), a strange, amateur, direct-to-video release, has become a mythic object over time. Emilio Silva Torres scratches the surface to find out about its mysterious maker, but also about the political traumas surrounding the moment of its making.

In 1988, Uruguay’s ostensibly first direct-to-video release hit the shelves: Acto de violencia en una joven periodista. Over the decades, this bizarre amateur psycho thriller turned into a local cult item, in no small part because of the mysteries that surrounded its director, Manuel Lamas – who was nowhere to be found. Did he really exist? What about those further three films he supposedly made but which seem to never have seen any kind of release?

Emilio Silva Torres wanted to find out more about this secretive outsider artist, as well as the cult status surrounding his work(s). What he found was troublesome: judging by the accounts of people who knew Lamas, he was quite a character, and not a nice one – obsessive, vain and prone to violence. The fans, it seems, intuited that much and read the film, if they went beyond the layer of cult trash, as an expression of Uruguay’s suppressed collective memories – a legacy of political oppression that took their shape in the audiovisual as this howl of rage.

– Olaf Möller

Trailer

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