Cinema
Pasado el meridiano
José María Arzuaga · 1965
Synopsis
An advertising agency employee asks for leave to go and bury his mother. It is refused. From there, the day goes on: the offices, the streets of Bogotá, the people he meets, the ordinary humiliation of a man who cannot afford his grief. Nothing comes from anywhere but that refusal, and the film stays with him to the limit of what he can bear.
Context
Shot at weekends over five months, without a written screenplay, with the means that advertising left to its author, and produced by the firm that employed him. The film was censored in Colombia as in Spain, poorly received on release, and rediscovered afterwards; a history of the country's cinema ranks it among the missed classics, spoiled by precarious production conditions and by the lack of adequate technical collaborators, but valuable as testimony. It runs for one hundred minutes.
Who it is for
A black-and-white feature film, in Spanish. A narrative without a constructed plot, shot in the streets: its form follows what the shoot allowed.
Prizes and reception
Banned in both of its author's countries, panned when it came out, and regarded today as one of the few neorealist films of Colombia.