This film follows two young brothers of the indigenous Tarahumara people of north west Mexico, who are asked to deliver medicine to a nearby town by their grandfather. The boys take their grandfather's horse without permission and end up losing it and each other during their search for the horse. The entire movie was shot on a budget of about $400,000 and all the parts were played by indigenous non-actors. I was hoping this would stand out as a charming example of back to basics story telling, in contrast to the Hollywood system of keeping your attention with gratuitous sex, violence, and special effects. To some degree it did, but ultimately the acting was so bad (and I feel terrible saying this, but it's true) that it was hard to stay in the story. To sell this story the audience really needs to believe and like these two brothers. The fact that the kids weren't trained actors, or even given a script to work off, meant that they took a lot of time deciding what to say, giving their on-screen relationships a very disconnected feel. I appreciate what directors Israel Cárdenas and Laura Amelia Guzmán tried to do with this film for the Tarahumara, and they seemed like genuinely nice people, but this film just didn't do it for me. The most interesting facets of the film were the details about how these people live and I can't help but feel maybe they should have just made a documentary.
Review of Cochochi
