What We Never Said

In mid November, the dead ones appeared floating on the Strait of Magellan tied together to life vests, cellular phones, computers and passports. Two of them were found malnourished, another with scurvy and typhus and Yin Xinji’s body was never found. In June, Carmen’s cousin told her that on the lighthouse close to his ranch, a starving Asian man, hid there for three days before disappearing. Apparently, he headed towards La Pampa.

Raquel has been the live-in housekeeper for a kind, reasonably wealthy family for half her life, and the joyless repetition of the job has begun to take its toll. Increasingly dependent on painkillers, Raquel resorts to pranks and childish avoidance to antagonize the family’s college-age daughter and a procession of new servants, all in the hopes of protecting her precarious power within the home. Her antics successfully push everyone away, until new maid Lucy actually pushes back.

A story of two teens, brother and sister, who live with their dying mother in a rundown mansion in Zacatecas, sustain by a dangerously dependent relationship.

In this poetic, richly allegorical debut by Colombian director William Vega, a teenage girl flees to a rundown inn after being driven from her home in the Andean highlands by civil war, as the violence engulfing the country creeps ever closer to her remote refuge. (TIFF)