El bella Vista

It’s been 20 years since a fight broke out in a small provincial city in Uruguay between soccer fans and the players of the local Bella Vista soccer club. The team was eliminated from the competition and its abandoned clubhouse was eventually taken over by a highly popular transvestite brothel. Onetime director of the club and local strongman Patón Lerena, however, won’t stand for such a “desecration” of the clubhouse. He rouses the former players and begins transforming this new “den of iniquity” into a Catholic chapel. Documentarist Alicia Cano records the entire enterprise with a flair for tapping into the particular artistic sensibility she finds in that remote corner of the world. Moreover, from a formal point of view, she also introduces stylized and semi-acted sequences, in which the characters of her playful documentary bring to mind the magical-realistic microworld of a Marquez novel or, conversely, the antiheroes of a TV sports drama. (Karlovy Vary International Film Festival)