Santa Teresa and Other Stories (Santa Teresa y otras historias)

Directed by Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias.
Dominican Republic/US/Mexico, 2015, DCP, color and b&w, 65 min.
Spanish with English subtitles.
DCP source: Filmmaker

As its title suggests, de Los Santos Arias’ second feature funnels fact and fiction into a cinematic slipstream of historical memory and bygone storytelling conventions. Summoning a rare kind of lyrical fury, the Dominican director nimbly transposes several themes nascent to his prior films—cultural erasure, exploitation, and spirituality—to a fictional border town reminiscent of the notorious Mexican city Ciudad Juárez. Alternately invoking and extrapolating from Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s unfinished, posthumously published novel 2666, de Los Santos Arias surveys the blood-strewn streets through a variety of female voices who testify to the untold number of disappeared women haunting the region’s outwardly religious and festive facade. Images, both still and moving and presented alternately in color and black and white, of tombs and cathedrals, abandoned buildings and crime scene evidence, comprise a montage that regenerates from moment to moment through a subtle latticework of juxtapositions and figural motifs. Rooted in oral customs, the film literally and figuratively speaks to the myths that arise from a combination of local folklore, religion and cultural (mis)representation, all the while hinting at genres (e.g. Westerns, film noir) not typically associated with nonfiction filmmaking. From the ruins of the forgotten, fabricated or simply silenced, de Los Santos Arias fashions a kind of poetic essay that nimbly traverses time, space and tradition.

Part of the Harvard Film Archive film series: Fables of the Reconstruction. Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias.

Presented in collaboration with The Harvard Film Archive.