DVD: Southern District

A Bolivian upper-crust family comes to gradual pieces in Juan Carlos Valdivia’s 2009 Southern District (Zona Sur), which won best director and script prize in the World Cinema section at Sundance the following year. Delayed in its UK DVD release, this thought-through film proves worth waiting for.

Its title refers to the name of one of the better districts of the country’s capital La Paz, and Valdivia tells a slow-burn story of the break-up of a traditional world, with convincing portrayals of somewhat superficial lead characters, their existence thrown into uneasy counterpoint through their dependence on their Aymara Indian servants; the latter both maintain the fiction of the household’s continuance, at the same time as they are exploited by it.

It’s clear from the start that the boy of the family, Andres (Nicolas Fernandez, a vivid performance), is as much at home in the kitchen company of the house major-domo Wilson (Pascual Loayza) and the family maid. This is no typical upstairs-downstairs environment though, given that Wilson is a close confidant for uneasy matriarch Carolina (Ninon Del Castillo): she’s divorced, although we learn nothing of that past family unit, whatever it was. Wilson not only advises her on wardrobe choices as she goes off to social and business functions which never seem to bring in any tangible results, but also, subversively, showers in the family bathrooms, an immediate indication that all is not well in this enclosed though intimate and seductively beautiful world.

The immediate family bonds seem destructively close too, especially in Carolina’s contact with her fickle playboy son; her daughter, meanwhile, is rebelling against her background, and in a loosely depicted lesbian relationship with a half-Indian girl. This younger generation seems to be playing out a typically privileged jeunesse dorée existence, but the cracks are showing. These casual class cruelties are accentuated in Southern District’s closing third with added emphasis on the uneasy racial distinctions that underlie Bolivian society.

A strangely Chekhovian shadow hangs over the film’s closing reel – remarkable just how far the Cherry Orchard accents of the Russian dramatist can be convincing transported around the world. For visual emphasis, the constantly roving camera of cinematographer Paul de Lumen emphasizes this unease from the beginning (some may well consider somewhat distractingly so). But these elaborate aristo gardens in this little known Latin American capital will soon apparently give way to blocks of flats, with the added indignity (at least from the perspective of the previous occupiers) that a longstanding racial injustice will be corrected in the process.

Valdivia’s film delivers incrementally, as the wider dynamics of this microcosmic world become clearer, some dramatic shortcomings notwithstanding. No extras on this DVD release: a shame, because a little more external social context and commentary on the realities of this distant (for many viewers, at least) world could well be revealing.