LAND AND SHADE (LA TIERRA Y LA SOMBRA) New Auteurs

Awarded the coveted Camera d’Or prize at the 2015 Cannes Film Festival, César Augusto Acevedo’s magnificently photographed minimalist feature debut reveals rich pleasures beneath its luscious veneer. With his estranged son gravely ill, an old farmer returns to the sugarcane fields of rural Colombia where the family and land he long ago abandoned have withered dramatically, devastated by industrial progress. As ash rains nightly all around them, the final throes of a family’s fragile turmoil play out. Acevedo takes a gorgeously bleak, meticulous approach, with sweeping movements, calculated sequencing and deceptively simple use of space and staging that deserve to be studied by aspiring film students. LAND AND SHADE will reward patient viewers with a story of classic struggle and humanist themes expressed through the power of the moving image. Its deeply penetrating scope will long be remembered. —Landon Zakheim