La jaula de oro (The Golden Cage)

This screening took place on Wednesday, February 5, 2014 at 5:00 pmYukon Arts Centre

"Three teenagers from the slums of Guatemala—tough guy Juan (Brandon Lopez), Sara (Karen Martinez), who cuts her hair and binds her breasts in order to pass as a boy, and Samuel (Carlos Chajon), the smallest and most easily swayed of the trio—travel toward the US in search of a better life. On their journey through Mexico, they meet Chauk (Rodolfo Dominguez), an Indian from Chiapas who doesn’t speak Spanish. Travelling together in cargo trains, walking on the railroad tracks, they face harsh day-to-day realities. From their journey, director Diego Quemada-Díez fashions a powerful yet unsentimental thriller replete with action, humour and intrigue. "Spanish director Diego Quemada-Díez was a camera assistant on Ken Loach’s Carla’s Song, Land and Freedom and Bread and Roses, and there is something very Loachian in this tough, absorbing, suspenseful drama… He has avowedly stuck to Loach’s realist directing style: shooting in narrative sequence and using a semi-improvisatory approach on location. It is interesting that while British directors such as Andrea Arnold and Clio Barnard have hyper-evolved the Loach idiom into beautifully realized and photographed dramas of naturalism, Quemada-Díez is arguably closer to the gritty, grainy original… [This] is a very substantial movie, with great compassion and urgency."—Peter Bradshaw, Guardian In Spanish with English subtitles