New York City’s Film Forum will host the U.S. theatrical premiere of the Bolivian film Utama, the debut feature by director Alejandro Loayza Grisi, starting on Friday, November 4. The film, which is being released in the U.S. by Kino Lorber, had its world premiere at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival where it won the Grand Jury Prize in World Cinema Competition, and was recently selected as Bolivia’s submission for Best International Feature at the 2023 Academy Awards.
The language of love for an elderly Quechua couple living in the starkly sublime Bolivian highlands is gesture, silence, and the tender facial expressions of two people as intimate with each other's wants and worries as they are with the drought threatening their livelihood.
Cinematography by Bárbara Álvarez (Lucrecia Martel’s The Headless Woman) sets the vibrant colors of domestic life against arresting widescreen tracking shots of rural Bolivia's cracked earth and a (stunningly photogenic) herd of llamas. The search for water, a health crisis, and a city-born grandson's pressure to abandon their ranch and way of life converge in this moving drama of devotion and survival.
Loayza Grisi is a Bolivian filmmaker whose artistic career began with still photography. As a director of photography, he worked on the documentary series Planeta Bolivia, and many short films such as Aicha, Dochera and Polvo.
