FESTIVALS Spain
El mundo es nuestro: Against the crisis? Hold up a bank!
by Sergio Ríos Pérez
24/04/2012 - In-your-face, frenetic, insultingly alive. This Sunday, the 15th Málaga Spanish Film Festival had its first hit in its ZonaZine section. El mundo es nuestro (lit. “The world is ours”) is born of the overflowing, perhaps even excessive, passion of its young creators led by director and screenwriter Alfonso Sánchez. The film was so popular at the festival that organisers had to programme in two extra screenings, besides the two screenings originally planned, to which tickets were sold out in only a few hours.
In El mundo es nuestro, “er Cabesa” and “er Culebra”, two small-time thieves from a marginal neighbourhood in Sevilla, decide to bring a little social justice back to the world. They will do it in their own way, or rather in the way of their hero “el Dioni”. They will hold up a bank and escape with the money to Brasil. But the hold-up goes terribly wrong when, instead of their plan, they become the hostages of a desperate employee strapped up with bombs threatening to blow up the bank.
The hostages make up a microcosm of Sevilla in a time of crisis. There is the unemployed man doing odd jobs for his brother-in-law, the unscrupulous businessman, the couple under the pressure of having to take out a mortgage, the check-out girl alienated by her badly paid job, and the cleaner still looking after her adult son. When the public learns about the situation, an unexpected media circus starts to unfold...
El mundo es nuestro, made with no more than €500,000, part of which was raised through crowdfunding, has bucket-loads of self-confidence, entertaining and brilliant dialogues (although perhaps a little difficult to understand for those outside Andalusia), and charismatic characters. Its sheer force makes its shortcomings and obvious lack of resources secondary. (The police plot is much weaker than the bank plot, there are ups-and-downs in the screenplay, and the second half flirts dangerously with the epic genre, while the more ambitious scenes, especially those involving crowds, give away the film’s low budget.) But the charm of El mundo es nuestro resides in its impulsive imperfection.
(Translated from Spanish)
