On This Side of the World
Spain • 1h 36m
Directed by David Trueba • Drama • With Vito Sanz, Anna Alarcón, Ondina Maldonado, Joaquín Notario, Janfri Topera, Zidane Barry • 2020 • 96 minutes
Alberto, a dull and indolent engineer, is fired from his company just as he plans to buy a house with his girlfriend and become parents. To cover it up, he decides to accept an assignment from his former boss to travel to the city of Melilla, a Spanish enclave in North Africa and gate to Europe. Alberto must renovate, underhand, the system of fences that not only separates one piece of land from another, a city from a country, but two universes in eternal collision: those who want to enter and those who prevent them from doing so. There, he will meet Nagore, a police officer in charge of guiding him through the unknown space, and he will come face to face with the complexity of one of the great issues that shake the world: immigration. Who are the good guys? Who are the bad guys? Trueba proves once again that he is a man concerned with the great conflicts of contemporary humanity, and that his approach to these conflictive issues is far from being frivolous and distant. The filmmaker observes the world with curiosity, compassion, and a multifaceted gaze, which allows him to delve deeper into the subject without losing his narrative pulse.
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