LA DEMORA

        

Uruguay, Mexico, France
2012
84 m.
Original language: Spanish

Direction: Rodrigo Plá
Screenplay: Laura Santullo
Production: Christian Valdelièvre, Sandino Saravia
Co-Production: Alexandre Mallet-Guy
Cinematography: Maria Secco
Editing: Miguel Schverdfinger
Sound: Alejandro de Icaza, Fabián Olivier
Music: Leonardo Heiblum, Jacobo Lieberman
Cast: Roxana Blanco, Carlos Vallarino, Oscar Pernas, Cecilia Baranda, Thiago Segovia, Facundo Segovia

SYNOPSIS:
We all learned as children that when you ride a bus you’re supposed to give up your seat for the elderly. The Delay is basically a film about what happens when someone forgets this childhood lesson and, many years later, is even capable of abandoning her own aging father in a park because she is unable to support him financially. Mexican director Rodrigo Plá, who was actually born in Uruguay, adopts a certain essence of the sort of nostalgic and incisive films made in Montevideo, along the lines of Whisky (Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll, 2004), in order to film one woman’s personal apocalypse, her internal rupture that ends up causing collateral damage as this woman who is incapable of resisting the weight of her own life decides to abandon her father who is suffering from Alzheimer’s. What could have become (and, in essence, is) a melodrama, is also an exercise in filmic purification with its own tour de force: most of the film depends on the performances of the two protagonists, one of whom is anchored to a bench where he waits in vain to be picked up, like an abandoned animal incapable of accepting his master’s betrayal. Most of the film, which does not simply portray the grim side of Uruguay but also, especially, the complexity and pain of one person’s humble life, unfolds on that bench near Montevideo’s main avenue. (Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria)

FESTIVALS PARTICIPATION:
2012: Berlin, BAFICI, Era New Horizons, Guadalajara, Punta del Este, CPH/PIX, Open Doek, Utrecht, Bruxelles Age D’Or, FUNF Seen.

RODRIGO PLÁ (Uruguay, 1968)
Rodrigo studied at the Film Training Center in Mexico City. He has directed, produced and written scripts for several short films. His debut film, La zona, won important awards at festivals such as Venice, Toronto, San Francisco and Montreal. His next feature, The Desert Within, won eight Ariel Awards from the Mexican Academy of Film Arts and Sciences, as well as other distinctions at Guadalajara and Havana. Plá contributed a segment called 30-30 to the collective film Revolución. His latest work, The Delay, was screened at the Berlinale Forum and has been selected to represent Uruguay in the race for the Oscar for Best Foreign Language Film.

Filmography: La demora (2012), Revolución (2010), Desierto adentro (2008), La zona (2007), El ojo en la nuca (2000), Novia mía (1995).