Barrio triste

In Medellín, Colombia, director Stillz unleashes a wild, Harmony Korine–produced portrait of four tough teenagers.

We are thrown straight into a chaotic 1990s world as a gang of lawless youths in a marginalized Medellín neighborhood steals a camera from a local TV crew—and continues filming their own antics. The film delves deeper into the neighborhood and into the night in an eerily poetic way, gradually revealing social decay and the loneliness hidden behind the boys’ tough exteriors. Music video director and photographer Stillz makes his feature debut with a boldly raw and hallucinatory vision that never falls into exploitation, heightened by Arca’s electrifying music.

• Niclas Goldberg