“Rara” at Latin American Film Festival
By hola | Published | No Comments
Festival continues through Oct. 5
Released in February 2016, director, Pepa San Martin introduces the coming-of-age film, Rara. Originally debuting in the Berlin International Film festival earlier this year, the Chilean cultured film made its way to the Washington, D.C. area in the American Film Institute’s Latin American Film Festival.
A story of the search for balance, Rara explores the complicated emotions of 12-year-old, Sara, who is coming into puberty while trying to understand and cope with her two separate families: her father, who has now remarried and her mother, with whom she lives with, has settled down with her lesbian partner, Lia. As she is trying to find her place between high school, her first crush, and her upcoming thirteenth birthday party, her spiraling emotions thwarts her parents into a custody battle as they attempt to determine which home is most suitable to raise she and her younger sister, Catalina.
In the relatively short film, San Martin and co-writer, Alicia Scherson depict the “modern family”, mismatched with stepparents, separate homes, and differing ideas of parenting. It captured the new normal, with a twist, as the one of the parents finds new love in a same-sex partner. Though the film encapsulates all of these aspects, the length diminished some of the details that would have been nice for the viewer to see. The audience was able to be well-engrossed in the feature, but just as quickly as the movie reached its climax, the credits rolled. Not quite a cliff-hanger– viewers were certainly able to infer the fate of the largest plot within the storyline – but it left for many of the subplots to be unanswered. Now what? Does this work out? What happens with this part of Sara’s life?
The work is admirable as it provides a realistic portrayal of today’s family life: dysfunction, chaos, lots of sarcasm, but most importantly, and more triumphantly – unyielding love between parents and their children and the quest well-being of one another.
-Charlei Baylor
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