One in a Thousand

The beginning of this movie was boring,With a story that develops kind of mixed feelings because of the environment in a poor neighborhood in Argentina. The only good thing I could saw was the story of the 2 brothers that wanted to know all about sexuality and love. But The acting was very poor and also the direction of this film made me feel I was wasting my time and I was right when went blank at the end of the movie with no logical of the whole story or what the director wanted to transmit !

If you haven't heard of "Las mil y una" ("One in a Thousand" in English), don't be surprised. This isn't the sort of movie produced with the aim of earning a billion dollars, and doesn't have any top stars. It's so obscure that it doesn't have an entry on the English Wikipedia; not even director Clarisa Navas does.

Anyway, the movie is about a group of people in a working-class neighborhood. Interest in sports, explorations of sexuality, and other things abound, but the question remains as to whether or not there's any hope of getting out of this place.

A lot of the story gets told through images more than words. I like it when a movie does that. In the end, this is no masterpiece, but worth seeing as a look at Argentina's working class. Quite the opposite of the images of Argentina that we usually get (gauchos, the tango, and Buenos Aires's cosmopolitanism).

This film is an attempt to bring LGBTQIA+ stories away from the white, middle class setting most of the film representation focuses on. However there are various problems in "Las Mil y Una" that are simply not being addressed as harmful behaviour and de facto normalised. Consent is not being discussed in any pairing of the film (assault is not defined as assault which leads to quite triggering scenes) and health precautions in regards to STDs and STIs are blatantly MOCKED.

Iris (Sofía Cabrera)) lives in the poor neighborhood of Las Mil Casas, in Corrientes (Argentina). She dropped out of school and shared her free time with her gay cousins Darío (Mauricio Vila) and Ale (Luis Molina) or wandered around the labyrinthine neighborhood chipping her basketball. But Renata (Ana Carolina García) will break into her life, giving rise to a particular love story. On the one hand, The thousand and one accompanies the coming age of Iris, fascinated with Renata, a kind of outgoing femme fatal older than her who is back in the Thousand; both will get closer against the background of certain gossip. But it is also about Iris's close friendship with her cousins and how both brothers live their gay sexuality in very different ways, in an environment where sexual choices and their fields of action are far from being partitioned.The young people of Las mil y una constitute a world with adults almost always out of the field. Navas's camera accompanies them with very long sequence shots, often in motion, giving scenes and dialogues an enormous naturalness (it is also worth noting that sometimes it is difficult to understand what they say). On the sexual plane, total frankness prevails, where modesty or explicitness is absolutely consistent with the psychology of the characters and situations. Certain scenes referred me to La Ciénaga, by Lucrecia Martel and I couldn't help but relate the film in general (its melancholy, its relaxation, its connection with the characters) with Who Are Who We Are, the Luca Guadagnino series (which premiered after ) about another group of young people (much more affluent, by the way) in the closed world of a military base. In sum, the second film by the young Corrientes director Clarisa Navas is a powerful portrait of the circulation of affection, desire and sexuality in a group of young people in that marginal neighborhood and a story of love and love, far from manners and of any misery.

This is the type of film that you do not know anything about and therefore you do not expect to obtain anything, but that by allowing yourself to be led by the different decisions of its creator both in script and in camera movements that as well as allow you to appreciate something it also hides others from you. I do not feel that I was seeing actors play a character but real human beings allowing me to see a piece of their life through a small window, this window has been masterfully designed by Clarisa Navas.