DIRECTOR: Carina Oroza Daroca & Ramiro Fierro
STARRING: Piti Campos, Alejandra Lanza, Arwen Delaine, David Mondaca, Cristian Mercado
RUNNING TIME: 1 hr 28 minutes
LANGUAGE: Spanish
PLOT: During a Bolivian dictatorship, Naty and her young daughter Anita are detained in a remote hacienda by soldiers searching for guerrilla fighters. Thirty years later, Anita, now a chef, returns to the place that once held her captive. Within its walls, she uncovers fragments of memory that help her finally confront the past and redefine her future.
GENRE: Drama
FILMING LOCATION: Tarija, Bolivia
To check out all previous submissions for Bolivia, click HERE.
STARRING: Piti Campos, Alejandra Lanza, Arwen Delaine, David Mondaca, Cristian Mercado
RUNNING TIME: 1 hr 28 minutes
LANGUAGE: Spanish
PLOT: During a Bolivian dictatorship, Naty and her young daughter Anita are detained in a remote hacienda by soldiers searching for guerrilla fighters. Thirty years later, Anita, now a chef, returns to the place that once held her captive. Within its walls, she uncovers fragments of memory that help her finally confront the past and redefine her future.
GENRE: Drama
FILMING LOCATION: Tarija, Bolivia
To check out all previous submissions for Bolivia, click HERE.
FILM REVIEW:
(This review contains spoilers.)
“She needs to know that her music is beside her and she needs to know that you are here."
Carina Oroza Daroca and Ramiro Fierro’s The Southern House is a quiet yet haunting confrontation with memory, repression, and the intergenerational trauma of Bolivia’s dictatorial past. The film opens in the oppressive stillness of a hacienda where Naty and her daughter Anita are detained by soldiers searching for guerrilla fighters. This opening sequence, shot with muted colors and a sense of claustrophobic calm, sets the tone for a film that is less concerned with overt violence than with the lingering silence it leaves behind. The directors craft a visual and emotional language that evokes how fear seeps into domestic spaces, transforming them into silent witnesses of history.
Thirty years later, the film shifts from political drama to intimate reckoning. Anita, now a professional chef, returns to the house where her childhood trauma unfolded. Her return is not framed as a heroic act of vengeance but as a slow and tender rediscovery of her own fragmented identity. Oroza Daroca and Fierro refuse melodrama; instead, they lean on quiet gestures, subtle sound design, and carefully composed frames that convey more than words ever could. The film’s pacing, meditative yet deliberate, mirrors Anita’s internal rhythm as she sifts through the ghosts of memory buried beneath the hacienda’s walls.
The directors’ approach to time is especially striking. Past and present collapse into one another, often through visual echoes, a shadow, a piece of furniture, or a childhood toy that reappears decades later. The cinematography captures the Bolivian countryside with both nostalgia and unease, portraying it as a place suspended between beauty and pain. The restrained score deepens this sense of emotional limbo, accompanying Anita’s journey as she pieces together what happened to her mother, to her aunt and, by extension, to herself. In doing so, the film transcends historical reconstruction to become an exploration of how personal and national histories intertwine.
The Southern House is about reclaiming agency from silence. Anita’s confrontation with her past is not merely an act of remembrance but one of liberation, an insistence on understanding before forgiving, on naming before forgetting. Through her story, Oroza Daroca and Fierro suggest that confronting the wounds of history is the only way to heal from them. The film stands as a quiet, powerful reminder that houses, like nations, hold the echoes of what they once tried to hide.
(This review contains spoilers.)
“She needs to know that her music is beside her and she needs to know that you are here."
Carina Oroza Daroca and Ramiro Fierro’s The Southern House is a quiet yet haunting confrontation with memory, repression, and the intergenerational trauma of Bolivia’s dictatorial past. The film opens in the oppressive stillness of a hacienda where Naty and her daughter Anita are detained by soldiers searching for guerrilla fighters. This opening sequence, shot with muted colors and a sense of claustrophobic calm, sets the tone for a film that is less concerned with overt violence than with the lingering silence it leaves behind. The directors craft a visual and emotional language that evokes how fear seeps into domestic spaces, transforming them into silent witnesses of history.
Thirty years later, the film shifts from political drama to intimate reckoning. Anita, now a professional chef, returns to the house where her childhood trauma unfolded. Her return is not framed as a heroic act of vengeance but as a slow and tender rediscovery of her own fragmented identity. Oroza Daroca and Fierro refuse melodrama; instead, they lean on quiet gestures, subtle sound design, and carefully composed frames that convey more than words ever could. The film’s pacing, meditative yet deliberate, mirrors Anita’s internal rhythm as she sifts through the ghosts of memory buried beneath the hacienda’s walls.
The directors’ approach to time is especially striking. Past and present collapse into one another, often through visual echoes, a shadow, a piece of furniture, or a childhood toy that reappears decades later. The cinematography captures the Bolivian countryside with both nostalgia and unease, portraying it as a place suspended between beauty and pain. The restrained score deepens this sense of emotional limbo, accompanying Anita’s journey as she pieces together what happened to her mother, to her aunt and, by extension, to herself. In doing so, the film transcends historical reconstruction to become an exploration of how personal and national histories intertwine.
The Southern House is about reclaiming agency from silence. Anita’s confrontation with her past is not merely an act of remembrance but one of liberation, an insistence on understanding before forgiving, on naming before forgetting. Through her story, Oroza Daroca and Fierro suggest that confronting the wounds of history is the only way to heal from them. The film stands as a quiet, powerful reminder that houses, like nations, hold the echoes of what they once tried to hide.
