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Daniel Candia in To Kill a Man (Matar a un hombre)
The impressive rise of Chilean cinema shows no signs of slowing down, and out of the five recently announced Oscar 2015 contenders from Chile for Best Foreign Language Film, three were featured at MiamiFF31 this past March: To Kill a Man (Matar a un hombre), by Alejandro Fernández Almendras; Illiterate (Las analfabetas), by Moisés Sepulveda, and The Summer of Flying Fish (El verano de los peces voladores), by Marcela Said. Alejandro Fernández Almendras’ third feature film, To Kill a Man, took home the MiamiFF31’s Miami Future Cinema Critics Award, as well as the World Cinema Grand Jury Prize: Dramatic at Sundance 2014, along with extremely positive reactions from critics and audiences.
Variety.com’s Guy Lodge describes To Kill a Man as “A grim, fat-free revenge thriller that extracts an impressive degree of moral equivocation from its exceedingly simple premise.” It is essentially a psychological study on what it means to kill a man—not only delving into what drives a “good” man to kill, but also examining what happens after he does. When gentle middle-aged Jorge (Daniel Candia) chooses to defend his family’s honor by following feeling rather than the law, he lands in a place of ethical ambiguity. After years of tolerating evil “pranks” played on himself and his family and receiving vague assistance from the police, he quietly snaps.
Passive aggression is aggression after all, and, as said by writer-director Alejandro Fernández Almendras in the Q&A after one of two MiamiFF31 screenings, “We’re not made to kill people.” Fernández Almendras plays with the empathy of his audience, as their compassion for a desperate man is stretched until it can go no further. Sinister and sad, To Kill a Man ponders what’s left to do when authorities will no longer help. Fernández Almendras’ raw and impactful thriller reveals what a man is capable of in order to recover the freedom and dignity he and his family have lost once all other options have been spent. To Kill a Man will begin its commercial debut at MDC’s Tower Theater on Friday, August 29th. —Tatyana Chiocchetti[/fusion_builder_column][/fusion_builder_row][/fusion_builder_container]
