PURA SANGRE
(PURE BLOOD)
dir. Luis Ospina, 1982
98 min. Colombia.
In Spanish with English subtitles.

THURSDAY, MAY 11 – 7:30 PM + 10 PM, followed by a discussion with actress and art director Karen Lamassonne, moderated by writer Steve Macfarlane

ONE NIGHT ONLY!

The first feature film produced by the storied Grupo de Cali— named for their hometown— PURA SANGRE follows a trio of health aides to a dying sugar magnate named Don Roberto who find themselves blackmailed into abducting and murdering children for the purposes of keeping him alive, one blood transfusion at a time. As writer Andres Caicedo referred to Cali as “a city that doesn’t open its doors to desperate men”, Ospina’s careful eye registers the mercenaries’ dispassionate crimes with surreal casualness. Filmmaker Carlos Mayolo (CARNE Y TU CARNE) stars as one of Don Roberto’s three contract killers, giving deadpan casualness to a day’s work committing one atrocity after another.

A cinephilic work par excellence, PURA SANGRE invites metatextual scrutiny across each of its cool-registered plotlines, as Don Roberto watches JOHNNY GUITAR and CITIZEN KANE from his deathbed. The conspiracy at its heart invites any number of analogies: in interviews Mayolo and Ospina both discussed the “monster of Mangones” terrorizing Cali growing up, a string of disappearances and murders of young boys that haunted a generation of neighborhood kids. Contemporaneously, Don Roberto’s empire finds itself in hock to sleazy drug dealers, widening the scope of PURA SANGRE’s design of tragedy. Ospina’s vision of evil can barely even be called “satiric” but nonetheless is, cutting both backwards and forwards in history.