Monos
Directed by Alejandro Landes
Colombia/Argentina | 2019 | Fiction | 102 min
Spanish w/ English subtitles
Film Source: Neon
Awards/premier festivals: Sundance Film Festival – World Cinema Dramatic Jury Award
Monos takes place entirely in remote mountains and jungles, where eight teenage commandos with guns and code names like Smurf, Bigfoot and Rambo watch over a milk cow and a female hostage they call Doctora (Julianne Nicholson) for a collective named The Organization. The film is an unwavering visual and psychological dare that illustrates the surreal nature of war, seen mostly from the unique perspective of adolescence. As director Alejandro Landes says: “The idea was to create an atemporal world, out of place, out of time, far away from everything. … Though the specifics of the Colombian civil war are the source of inspiration, the idea was always for the experience of the film to cross borders and exist as a world in and of its own.” ~OY