Cinema
Candy or Mint
Caluga o menta
Gonzalo Justiniano · 1990
Synopsis
Niki and his friends, young unemployed men from a marginal neighbourhood of Santiago at the end of the eighties, have nothing to do and slide towards drugs and delinquency. During one of their outings, Niki meets Manuela, whom everyone calls “the madwoman”, and falls in love with her. The precision and harshness with which the film shows the lives of these young people from poor neighbourhoods have been noted; Aldo Parodi, Luis Alarcón and Myriam Palacios, as Niki's mother, complete the cast.
Context
Released in 1990, the year of the return to democracy, the film is regarded as one of the first made after the dictatorship and was in 1991 the first Chilean film nominated for the Goya for best Ibero-American film. Justiniano says he fed it with his experience as a reporter filming the protests and the young people he met there, very similar in his view to those of other countries, Leah Kemp reports. Mauricio Vega plays Niki, Patricia Rivadeneira Manuela.
Who it is for
A harsh urban chronicle, centred on a gang of young people; distributed in English under the title Candy or Mint.
Prizes and reception
Regarded as a symbol of the social situation of the transition, and noticed in Spain as early as 1991.
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