Open Air | Monos - English subtitled
On a faraway Colombian mountaintop, a group of child soldiers are on a mission: make sure that Doctora, a kidnapped American woman, stays alive.
Patagrande, Rambo, Leidi, Sueca, Pitufo, Lobo, Perro and Bum Bum. Eight stray teenagers, each bearing a code name, form a paramilitary squad on a remote hilltop. They are instinctively drawn towards hedonism and ferocity. A messenger delivers instructions from the Organisation: they are to look after a dairy cow called Shakira and an abducted woman from the USA known as Doctora. But their carefree time ends when death pays them a visit and their position is compromised, forcing them to relocate deeper into the jungle.
MONOS captivates us with its striking baroque aesthetic, otherworldly setting, and ingenious reframing of the war film – one that uses adolescence to insinuate a youthful but elusive dream of peace. Director Alejandro Landes constructs a stylized, deceptively surreal space that teeters between tedium and hedonism, made more unsettling by its disquieting soundscape and Mica Levi’s tense score. As they descend into a jungle, captors and captive alike find themselves in an increasingly anarchic, unhinged ‘nowhere world’ that echoes LORD OF THE FLIES and APOCALYPSE NOW.