New Order

One of the most expressive and versatile filmmakers in contemporary Latin American cinema, Michel Franco (After Lucia, Chronic), electrified audiences at the Venice Festival and left the Lido with a Silver Lion (Grand Jury Prize). New Order offers a vision of a world in which enormous class differences lead to riots, killings, and kidnappings on a massive scale. Pushed to the margins of society, people take up arms and opt for ruthless revenge. Franco’s film is a brutal, shocking, and perfectly staged thriller. The most striking thing about the director’s vision is that we are dealing not with a baseless fantasy but a highly probable vision of the near future. Perhaps in some parts of the world (and are they really so distant?) such horrors are already the order of the day. No wonder the director said, when receiving his Venetian prize, that he had a dystopia in mind when he wrote the screenplay six years—the fact that it is extraordinary relevant to what is happening today really surprised him.