(Originally reviewed Sept. 28, 2022)
Pitched somewhere between gritty neorealism and lyrical magic realism, Colombian director Laura Mora’s second feature Kings of the World (Los Reyes del Mundo) is a melodramatic coming-of-age road movie rich in caustic social commentary, dreamlike visual interludes and sporadic bloody violence. Swept along by the anarchic energy of its young non-professional cast, mostly Medellín street kids playing semi-fictional versions of themselves, the episodic plot feels wildly undisciplined at times, especially the muddled ending. But a charitable viewing might read this as intentional, reinforcing the ever-present sense of barely controlled chaos and edgy survivalist anxiety that defines lawless young lives on the margins.
A more formally adventurous work than Mora’s feature debut Killing Jesus (2017), which landed her a Berlinale prize, Kings of the World has just won the top Golden Shell award at San Sebastian film festival, cementing the Basque screen showcase’s solid reputation for championing emerging Latin American talent. This messy but big-hearted love letter to the loveless is currently screening in Zurich, with more festival slots likely. Prize-winning buzz and co-production credits with multiple European partners should boost potential art-house bookings beyond Spanish-language markets.
Kings of the World opens in a familiar poverty-porn milieu, with machete-wielding teenage gangs clashing in the grimy, crumbling barrios of Medellín. But Mora then reverses the standard movie-plot trope by steering her young anti-heroes out of the city and into Colombia’s picturesque rural hinterlands. Informal father figure to a gang of homeless street urchins, 19-year-old Rá (Carlos Andrés Castañeda), has just been awarded the legal deeds to his late grandmother’s derelict country farmstead as part of a government scheme returning properties to families displaced during decades of civil war with the FARC guerrillas. Rá’s impossible dreams of escaping the ghetto suddenly seem to be within his grasp.
Together with Sere (Davison Andrés Florez), Nano (Brahian Stiven Acevedo), Winny (Cristian Camilo David Mora) and bellicose hot-head Culebro (Cristian David Campaña), Rá sets off into the deep countryside to secure his rightful destiny. Sharing their aspirations in fragmentary poetic monologues, sometimes in voice-over, this fragile alternative family unit dream of creating their own promised land, a magical kingdom “where nobody beats us up or humiliates or looks down on us.” Along the way they meet wise hermits and kindly strangers, but also racist thugs, armed gangs and implacable government bureaucrats. “This land isn’t as peaceful as it looks,” one local cautions the boys.
Perhaps designed to mirror the disorienting culture-shock effect on her innocent young protagonists, Mora gives their journey an increasingly fantastical, surreal edge. The first hint that we are not in Kansas any more is a stop-over at a bizarre roadside brothel run by matronly older women who offer these lost boys a taste of the warm maternal comforts they never enjoyed at home, clutching them close as they slow-dance to discordant piano music under lurid neon lights. Echoes of David Lynch are strong here, though Mora may also be paying homage to a similarly tender scene in Brazilian director Hector Babenco’s classic juvenile delinquent drama Pixote (1980).
The boys also experience misty hallucinations, mystical visions of a white horse, and the hospitality of a cheery old couple living in a cobwebbed ruin of a shack, who appear to be ghosts. In her San Sebastian press conference, the director explained that she purposely blurred the film’s sense of time and place, opening up porous borders between past and present, reality and fantasy.
Kings of the Road does not overly sentimentalise Rá and his gang – they are petty criminals after all, resorting to casual vandalism and thuggery throughout the film. But Mora does allow them a degree of childlike vulnerability, charming charisma and hard-won wisdom. As they move closer to their elusive fantasy of freedom, they also come to realise that the bloody turf wars they left behind in Medellín also exist in the jungle, just on a larger and more organised scale. Many of their key encounters end badly, in bitter betrayal, threats of violence or the real thing, some of it fatal. By the end of their journey, only three of the initial five survive, their scrappy dreams of starting afresh in tatters.
Mora could have ended Kings of the World here, with this harsh lesson in hard-nosed reality. Instead, without getting into spoilers, she allows her flawed young pilgrims some embers of hope, still dreaming of a better life in a better place. It makes for a muddy conclusion, with too many loose threads and odd tangents, but arguably a more humane and less conventional pay-off than many directors would have chosen. Initially charged with irony, that triumphalist title feels gradually more ambivalent as the film sprawls through multiple final scenes, all hinting at potentially different endings.
But however untidy it may be as narrative, Kings of the World is a consistently immersive and exhilarating sensory experience. David Gallego’s kinetic, free-wheeling cinematography is flashy but effective, whether weaving through Medellín traffic or pulling back to drink in majestic mountain valleys. Stand-out visual sequences include an adrenaline-pumping highway dash in which the boys hitch their flimsy bicycles to a fast-moving truck, and a lethal knife fight poetically lit by campfire flames. A lush, moody, largely electronic score by Leo Heiblum and Alexis Ruiz is overlaid with heightened sound design of forest flora and fauna, lending a sonic dimension to the film’s potent visual mix of urban jungle with actual jungle.
Director: Laura Mora
Screenwriters: Laura Mora, Maria Camila Arias
Cast: Carlos Andrés Castañeda, Brahian Stiven Acevedo, Davidson Andrés Flores, Cristian David Campaña, Cristian Camilo David Mora
Cinematography: David Gallego
Editing: Sebastian Hernandez, Gustavo Vasco
Music: Leo Heiblum, Alexis Ruiz
Producers: Cristina Gallego, Mirlanda Torres
Production companies: Ciudad Lunar (Colombia), La Selva (Colombia), Iris (Luxembourg), Tu Vas Voir (France), Talipot Studio (Mexico), Mer Films (Norway)
World sales: Film Factory Entertainment, Spain
Venue: San Sebastian International Film Festival (Official Selection)
In Spanish
100 minutes
