Alsino and the Condor

Set against the almost unbelievable brutality of an internecine guerilla war (Nicaragua, 1979), a young boy's dream to fly like the birds seems almost commonplace. In his dreams Alsino can fly, but when he wakes up everything is somehow different. The delightful Esquivel brings to the title role a fragile passion around which the Chilean film-maker Littin conjures an archetypal South American world of enchantment (the grandmother and her chest of secrets, the prostitute and the bird man, familiar from the writings of García Márquez and others) which can absorb intrusive realities as easily as the ever-present verdant jungle.