Cannes Critics’ Week Winner ‘La Jauria’ Unveils First Clip (EXCLUSIVE)

Manori Ravindran
·2 min read

On the heels of Critics’ Prize wins for Andres Ramirez Pulido’s “La Jauria,” Variety can reveal an exclusive clip from the Colombian film.

The pic on Wednesday won the Grand Prize at Critics’ Week, the Cannes Film Festival’s sidebar dedicated to first and second features. It also picked up the SACD prize.

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“La Jauria” centers on Eliu, a country boy, who is incarcerated in an experimental young offenders institution, deep in the heart of the Colombian tropical forest, for a crime he committed with his friend El Mono.

Every day, the teenagers perform hard manual labor and endure intense group therapy, under the menacing gaze of the camp guard Godoy. One day, El Mono is transferred to the same centre and with him comes the past that Eliu is trying to escape.

The film is being sold globally by Pyramide International.

Ramirez Pulido previously directed the short films “El Edén” and “Damiana,” and says the feature “La Jauria” follows on thematically from its predecessors.

“The three films deal with a personal concern which I brought to light through writing and directing — the importance of a father figure during childhood and teenage years [and] how a father’s love, care, or on the contrary his abandonment, absence or violence may affect lives,” said Ramirez Pulido.

He continued: “‘La Jauria’ is the story of a teenager and of a whole generation with a hate and death relationship with their fathers, an abandoned generation which is unknowingly a part of a cycle of inherited violence. How can children free themselves from a violence that pervades their very nature? How can we free ourselves from the immaterial inheritance of our parents that is haunting us every day? I thought I would follow Eliú, the main character, organically through his journey towards the light, so that he can break free from this hostile cycle. Thus, the idea emerged to connect him with something beyond the material, to set a meeting with the invisible.”

The Cannes Film Festival kicked off on May 17 and will come to a close on Saturday (May 28).

Watch an exclusive clip from the film below:

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