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
