There are moments in La Fortaleza when you feel like grabbing the protagonist and slapping him. At other times, you want to hug him. His descent into hell in the middle of the Venezuelan jungle, like a contemporary Heart of Darkness, makes you jump from anguish to hope, and from hope to amazement during a story that starts from a simple premise: Roque, a 40-year-old alcoholic, suddenly finds himself on his father's doorstep and has to decide what to do. He does not think much about it.
Against the backdrop of a Caracas convulsed by the political unrest that has been dragging on for years, Roque embarks on a journey that you don't know whether it's an escape or a search. He dives into the Amazon jungle, where he has an acquaintance with a clandestine gold mine. From that moment on, you watch on the screen scenes that you don't know if they are fiction or taken from a documentary. If that exists as it is, it is not recreated with incredible fidelity. Roque the alcoholic seeks personal redemption in the middle of that human jungle, trapped, by hand, in his own demons.
There is something even more moving in this film by Jorge Thielen Armand: the protagonist is inspired by his father, who also embodies him on the screen. Rarely does a story of such rawness start from a biography that is twofold, as it brings together the vision of the father and also that of the son, one of the most interesting Latin American filmmakers you can discover today.
La Fortaleza compite en nuestra sección oficial de esta 58 edición del FICX, dentro de la sección Tierres en Trance, que reúne lo mejor del cine iberoamericano actual, siempre comprometido con sus combates.
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