Sundance Review: Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s ‘Utama’

deadline.com:

Utama (Our Home) is precisely the sort of discovery that justifies film festivals and makes them useful: a small, hitherto unheard-of work from an out-of-the-way country that grabs you from the opening minutes and afterwards makes you want to tell your friends they’ve got a real treat to look forward to.

A rare Bolivian entry in a major festival, this Sundance World Dramatic Competition title and feature debut by Alejandro Loayza Grisi is gorgeously made and brings to life a backwater existence in a distant land with skill and assurance.“Backwater” should actually be “no water,” as such is the case in a Bolivian high desert more than two miles above sea level where even the wells have gone dry.

Young people are nowhere to be seen and the aged couple we meet, weather-beaten Virginio and Sisa, live in a small cabin, speak in a version of the ancient Incan Quechua language, have little to eat and even less to say to each other.

Like the local condors, the people here, Aymara migrants from the Altiplano countryside, are going extinct. It’s unlikely you’ve ever seen a film made anywhere near here before.The leathery Virginio and Sisa (Jose Calcina and Luisa Quispe, both non-pros) are, to be sure, tough old birds, especially the former, who rises at dawn every day and herds a large bunch of llamas (with pink ribbons on their ears) across the barren hills and sands and through the mostly deserted nearby town.