STILLZ hands a stolen Betacam to a gang of boys in 1980s Medellín and the faces that come back are hard to forget. The film around them is thin, loud and undecided about what it is for, and 84 minutes feels long.
STILLZ has directed music videos, and Barrio Triste is his first feature; he writes it, directs it and shoots it himself. The idea is simple and good. A gang of boys in a Medellín barrio in the 1980s steal a television news camera, a Betacam, and point it at themselves, and the 84 minutes that follow are what they recorded. The faces are the reason to see it. The film built around them is thin, loud and unsure what it wants from them, and it gets in their way.
The look is right, and it is right in a way that costs something. Betacam tape burns out in sunlight and smears when the camera moves, so a good many frames here are a white sky, a blur of wall or the back of somebody’s head. STILLZ lets that stand. Daniel Rincón Zapata’s production design and Ana María Acosta Ospina’s costumes are invisible in the proper sense: nothing looks dressed, nothing looks placed, and you would struggle to say what decade it was if you did not already know. For a while that is enough.
The boys carry it. Piojo (Juan Pablo Baena), Calambre (Tomas Tinoco Higuita), Apestado (Bryan Erlin Garcia) and Rata (Samuel Andres Celis) have the nicknames of kids nobody has bothered to name properly, and they treat the camera as a friend who will not talk back. The best stretches are the ones where one of them sits in front of it alone. We were got at by these, more than we expected. Nobody makes a speech; a boy looks at the lens, says less than he means to, and stops, and the tape keeps running on his face after he has finished. It is the plainest thing in the film and the thing we remember.
Then Arca’s score comes in, and it keeps coming in. It is electronic, it is heavy, and it is nearly always there, under the confessionals and over the street. The premise says this tape was shot by children on a stolen camera; the score says a musician has been at it since, and every time it rises we are reminded who is actually holding the picture. There are also passages that play as interviews, framed steadier and answered more fully than anything the boys shoot for themselves, and these feel arranged. The film cannot decide whether the boys are filming themselves or being filmed, and it tries both.
Adam Robinson’s cut does not solve the drift. Found footage has no plot until somebody gives it one, and for long stretches STILLZ does not: the boys walk, film, shout, film some more, and the tape rolls. The city’s history sits outside the frame. If you know what Medellín was in that decade you will supply it; if you do not, the film will not help you, and you will watch boys in a street for a while and wonder why. The second half hardens into something worse, which we will not describe, and the film only finds a shape once it finds its violence.
There is a standard for this, and it is local. Víctor Gaviria’s Rodrigo D: No Futuro (1990) put Medellín street kids on screen with no more money and a great deal more patience. The company behind this one, Harmony Korine’s EDGLRD, is a fair pointer to what STILLZ is after; Gummo had this grain and this drift, and it also knew when a scene had finished. Barrio Triste has the grain and does not have the patience.
The reviews so far split down the middle, half of them taken with the faces and half worn down by the score and the wandering, and we are close to the middle ourselves. If a stolen camera and a gang of boys who will not stop talking to it sounds like your evening, see it in a cinema, where a Betacam picture blown up to the size of a wall is the one thing here that gets better with size. At home the score grows and the boys shrink, and that is the wrong way round.
