Una carga de 100 litritos
2019 · 27m · Ecuador
Directed by Miguel Ángel Benalcázar
Genres: biography, documentary, historical
Tones: contemplative, melancholic, tender
The period in the life of Pedro Benalcázar (85), who in his youth smuggled sugar-cane alcohol from his village San José de Minas (Quito, Ecuador) to other settlements when its distribution was prohibited. Pedro, together with his grandson (the director of the documentary-short) and his family, will walk some of the trails he used to travel to remember episodes he lived in smuggling.
Picked by Zoe
The scouts
Everyone expects the scrappy family doc to *redeem* the smuggler, to soft-focus his past into folklore—but Benalcázar just walks the trails and lets the silence do the work, which somehow feels more subversive than any revisionist take.
A modest film formally, yes, but one acutely aware of its place in the documentary tradition of oral history and landscape as witness; the grandson-director's restraint and his refusal to aestheticize the elder's memory is precisely what gives it weight.
The decision to keep the camera tight on Pedro's face and boots—never widening to pretty the Ecuadorian terrain—turns what could be a travelogue into something intimate and irreplaceable; it's the discipline of that framing that elevates a home project into cinema.