Southern District
Director: Juan Carlos Valdivia
Writer: Juan Carlos Valdivia
Cast: Ninón del Castillo,
Pascual Loayza, Nicolás Fernández, Juan Pablo Koria, Mariana Vargas, Viviana Condori
Duration: 1h 44min
Language: Spanish, Aymara
Country: Bolivia
Cert: 18
Year: 2009
Winner of the Best Director and Best Screenplay awards (World Cinema) at Sundance Film Festival, Juan Carlos Valdivia’s retelling of the last crumbling days of Bolivian apartheid is vividly captured through the portrait of an upper class family as their lives slowly begin to turn upside down in its wake.
Nestled in the lush valley of La Paz, Bolivia, the upper-class suburb of Zona Sur has sheltered the country’s wealthy elite for many years. Here, in an adobe-tile-roofed castle, a statuesque matriarch reigns over her spoiled progeny and her Indigenous Aymaran butler. But all is not what it seems. As the mother fights with her oversexed son and clashes with her petulant daughter, her six-year-old son rambles the rooftops unnoticed. Decline hangs in the air, and the threat of aristocratic privileges changing hands signifies a new chapter of a prickly and ill-fated class war.