Al margen
2014 · 24m · Paraguay
Directed by Félix Arzamendia
Genres: coming-of-age, crime, drama
Tones: contemplative, dark, tense
Anselmo and Enrique share something in common, both wish to change their life, but it will not be easy for them; the lives of Anselmo, a young marginal delinquent, and of Enrique, a high-class student from Asunción, cross unexpectedly, and after that event their lives will be marked, at the margin of the law, where everything is valid.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
The class-collision setup promises subversion but plays it frustratingly straight—two lives 'marked at the margin' sounds like it should interrogate the crime-drama genre, not genuflect to it.
Arzamendia constructs a deliberate symmetry between social strata that recalls the pedagogical restraint of early Campanella; the formal architecture of parallel lives on opposing sides of the law grounds what could be exploitative material into something genuinely rigorous.
The unnamed event that fractures both trajectories—that structural hinge—suggests the real film lives in what's *not* shown; if Arzamendia commits to that ellipsis rather than explaining it away, there's something lean and devastating waiting in the gap.