The Colony - Jeremy C. Processing

Director – Gabriel Macaro – 2025 – Brazil, Netherlands, Mexico, Chile – Cert. 12a – 86m

***1/2

A 77-year-old woman, learning she is to be rehoused at a state home for the elderly, refuses to comply, instead setting out to fulfil a long-held dream – out in UK cinemas on Friday, April 17th

Tereza (Denise Weinberg), 77, is doing fine thank you very much, supporting herself with a job in an alligator slaughterhouse. All that changes when the government lowers the age at which people are considered too old to be economically productive and relocated to the out of town elderly home known simply as The Colony, about which details are in scant supply. The name carries with it specific cultural associations, since The Colony was a notorious, Brazilian psychiatric prison used for the purposes of removing from mainstream society individuals deemed undesirable or unacceptable for whatever reason by the authorities, as portrayed in the drama Nobody Leaves Alive (André Ristum, 2023). Further afield, in Chile, the name conjures the equally if not more notorious detention centre of the Pinochet regime which features in the drama The Colony (Florian Gallenberger,2015). The name of the institution doesn’t bode well on either account.… Read the rest

Nobody Leaves Alive
(Ninguém Sai Vivo Daqui)

Director – André Ristum – 2023 – Brazil – Cert. none – 86m

****

After a woman is incarcerated in Brazil’s notorious Colonia psychiatric hospital simply because she is pregnant outside of marriage, her hold on reality starts to disintegrate – premieres in the Critics’ Picks Competition at the 27th Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival

Lovingly shot in a stylish black and white that both makes the whole thing feel like a dream and detracts from any sense of reality, this opens with a young woman being bundled by two men into what looks like a cattle truck. Inside the truck are other people, and the group is clearly being sent somewhere specific.

Once off the train they are frogmarched down a country track, through some wrought metal gates of late 19th / early 20th Century design and into a hallway where they are separated into men and women and the women (since it is one woman’s story we are following here) are taken to a large, tiled room and hosed down by two women, the younger of whom is Laura.

Then the woman we are following is taken for interview with a man who denies he’s a doctor. Her name is Elisa, and she explains there’s been some sort of mix-up.… Read the rest