Documentary Films - Competition 2012 / El Bella Vista / Uruguay, Germany 2012
This playful movie records the transformation of a soccer clubhouse, formerly used by Uruguay’s provincial Bella Vista team, into a transvestite brothel and, finally, into a Catholic chapel. The characters are reminiscent, on the one hand, of the magical realistic microworld of a Marquez novel and, on the other, of the antiheroes of a TV sports drama.
It’s been 20 years since a fight broke out in a small provincial city in Uruguay between soccer fans and the players of the local Bella Vista soccer club. The team was eliminated from the competition and its abandoned clubhouse was eventually taken over by a highly popular transvestite brothel. Onetime director of the club and local strongman Patón Lerena, however, won’t stand for such a "desecration” of the clubhouse. He rouses the former players and begins transforming this new "den of iniquity” into a Catholic chapel. Documentarist Alicia Cano records the entire enterprise with a flair for tapping into the particular artistic sensibility she finds in that remote corner of the world. Moreover, from a formal point of view, she also introduces stylized and semi-acted sequences, in which the characters of her playful documentary bring to mind the magical-realistic microworld of a Marquez novel or, conversely, the antiheroes of a TV sports drama.
73 min / Color, HD CAM
World premiere
Director Alicia Cano
/ Screenplay Alicia Cano
/ Dir. of Photography Arauco Hernández
/ Editor Fernando Epstein
/ Producer Alicia Cano
/ Production Alicia Cano Films, MJ Producciones
/ Contact Taskovski Films Ltd.
Alicia Cano (b. 1982, Uruguay) earned her undergraduate degree in Media Studies, then traveled to Italy in 2006 to complete a master’s degree in documentary filmmaking. In subsequent years she made documentaries for Italian television. She currently lives in Montevideo, teaches film at the university, and coordinates the Pitching Forum for the Doc Montevideo festival. The Bella Vista is her first feature.
Taskovski Films Ltd.
19-21 Christopher Street, EC2A 2B, London
United Kingdom
Phone: +387 656 520 46
E-mail: [email protected]
Alicia Cano
Film Director
Thomas Mauch
Producer
Manuela Buono
Producer, Sales Agent
Irena Taskovski
Sales Agent
Marija Shajahan
Sales Agent
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