Oblivion Verses
(Los versos del olvido)

In Oblivion Verses, the characters are so discreet that one of them only speaks to us about the life of the dead from inside the grave he is digging. This invisible gravedigger is one of the closest companions of the equally anonymous caretaker of this graveyard for the destitute (the remarkable presence of Juan Margalo, The Spirit of the Beehive). One day, the caretaker is surprised by the visit of militiamen who seem to want to hide the civil victims of a demonstration. The discovery of a young woman’s body awakens other barely buried memories – of civil war, personal losses and other brutalities – that restore the importance of this silent activity and give an aesthetic value to the repeated and patient gestures of those who by providing graves also give the living a chance to survive their death. These characters, soon joined by an old woman in search of her missing daughter and a hearse driver, seem to live in a world of which they have become the sole custodians. In this debut feature filmed in Chile, the Iranian Alireza Khatami is in no way uprooted, as his film is tinged with a magical realism that brings us closer to a place and a question that are universal: how can one recount that which we can no longer even remember? AR