El Paraíso
Award-winning Italian drama – a combination of crime drama, unconventional love story and portrait of a dysfunctional mother-son relationship – about illegal Colombian immigrants on the outskirts of Rome.
Julio Cesar is almost forty years old and still lives with his Colombian mother. They share practically everything: a little house on the river filled with memories, the small amount of money earned working for a local drug dealer, a passion for evenings of salsa and merengue. An existence on the margins, lived with love, at once symbiotic and oppressive, whose precarious equilibrium risks being undermined with the arrival of Ines, a young Colombian who has just made her first journey as a cocaine ‘mule’. Between desire and jealousy the situation rapidly gets out of hand, to the point where Julio will find himself taking drastic measures, on a painful journey that will take him to the land of his origins for the first time.
Margarita Rosa De Francisco, a celebrated actress in her native Colombia, is a master at portraying the complexities of life, her relationship with her son, the loss of the country she was forced to leave, and the loneliness of living on the margins of a country where she carries with her the stamp of illegality. Besides a personal insight into an unconventional – or rather, dysfunctional - love affair, this is perhaps what director Artale subtly confronts us with most in EL PARAÍSO (Paradise).