Harvard Film Archive will host the retrospective film series “Fables of Reconstruction: Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias” from February 7 to 14, celebrating the groundbreaking and unclassifiable work of the Dominican filmmaker, the first Latin American to win the Silver Bear for Best Director with his latest film, Pepe.
The series will screen the four feature film the director has made up to date: You Look Like a Carriage That Not Even the Oxen Can Stop / Pareces una carreta de esas que no la para ni lo’ bueye (2013); Santa Teresa and Other Stories / Santa Teresa y otras historias (2015); Cocote (2017); and Pepe (2024).
De los Santos Arias’ little-seen first feature, You Look Like a Carriage That Not Even the Oxen Can Stop, opens with an extended shot of the New York skyline captured from a cable car suspended high above the city streets. From there, things move into the apartment of the director’s real-life aunt and cousin, Dominican immigrants doing their best to assimilate in an environment hostile to outsiders. Spoken largely in Caribbean Spanish, the film finds de Los Santos Arias—whose voice can often be heard off-camera—reconnecting with his relatives while simultaneously observing their isolated lives, which are marked by various physical, spiritual, and mental health struggles.
Santa Teresa and Other Stories funnels fact and fiction into a cinematic slipstream of historical memory and bygone storytelling conventions. Summoning a rare 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.
Cocote is a rapturous crime fable set in the Dominican Republic, the only feature by de Los Santos Arias set in his home country. The winner of the Best Film Award at the Locarno Film Festival’s Signs of Life competition, marks the coming of age of Dominican cinema in the international film circuit.. The film follows Alberto, a kind-hearted gardener returning home to attend his father’s funeral. When he discovers that a powerful local figure is responsible for his father’s death, Alberto realizes that he’s been summoned by his family to avenge the murder. It’s an unthinkable act—especially for him, an evangelical Christian. But as pressure mounts, he sees few ways out. Questions of faith, tradition, and honor course through this electrifying film, which, seemingly at the speed of thought itself, jumps between film formats, colors, and aspect ratios, radically envisioning a community torn asunder by senseless violence.
De Los Santos Arias’ most recent film, Pepe, won the Silver Bear for Best Director at 2024 Berlinale—marking the first time for a Latin American filmmaker. Also winner of this year’s Cinema Tropical Award for Best Non-Fiction Film, Pepe takes a fascinating, highly unorthodox approach to the strange but true tale of the hippopotamuses that escaped from the menagerie of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar and later fended for themselves, reproducing and becoming the target of government sterilizers and poachers. Told from the perspective of a sentient hippo, Pepe, at the moment of its death, the film shuffles modes of storytelling and alternates between nonfiction and fantasy. Skipping across time and continents, from Pepe’s home country of Namibia to the Rio Magdalena in Colombia, Pepe’s sympathetic inquiry and aesthetic muscularity pose provocative questions about the ever-shifting ecological stakes of life on Earth and the nature of being.
Director Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias will be in attendance for two evenings of screenings and conversations on Thursday, February 13, and Friday, February 14. For more information visit: https://harvardfilmarchive.org/programs/nelson-carlos-de-los-santos-arias.
