Santa Teresa & otras historias

How can one evoke the reality of the Mexican border, its violence, its vagueness – by trying to render it as justice? Nelson De Los Santos Arias has chosen to adapt, in his own way, a chapter from the renowned unfinished book, 2666 by Roberto Bolano. If Bolano was born in Chili, he spent many years in Mexico, and if his books are constructed as magnificent fictions, they are always based on very accurately documented facts. Here we have the serial murders of workers in factories situated on the border. Why these crimes? Why this obsession to attack women? This is the investigation that Juan de Dios Martinez, the journalist invented by Bolano, will lead in Santa Teresa, a town also fictious yet so similar to real ones. In this strategy of going to and fro between a truth stifl ed by the mystery and the fabulous which attempt to render a world more intelligible, the film never ceases to move forward in the leaps and bounds of such great and necessary formal liberty.(JPR)