Event

PURA SANGRE

aka Pure Blood
Dir. Luis Ospina, 1982
Colombia. 98 mins.

PURA SANGRE follows a trio of health aides to a dying sugar magnate named Don Roberto (Gilberto Fly Forero), who find themselves blackmailed into abducting and murdering children for the purposes of keeping him alive, one blood transfusion at a time. As Andres Caicedo referred to Cali as a city that doesnt open its doors to desperate men, Ospinas careful eye registers the mercenaries dispassionate crimes with surreal casualness. Carlos Mayolo - who, with Ospina, co-directed the shorts in the GRUPO DE CALI: 1971-1978 program - stars as one of Don Robertos three contract killers, giving deadpan casualness to a day's work committing one atrocity after another.

A cinephilic work par excellence, PURA SANGRE invites metatextual scrutiny across each of its cool-registered plotlines, as Don Roberto watches Johnny Guitar and Citizen Kane from his deathbed. The conspiracy at its heart invites any number of analogies: in interviews Mayolo and Ospina both discussed the monster of Mangones terrorizing Cali growing up, a string of disappearances and murders of young boys that haunted a generation of neighborhood kids. Contemporaneously, Don Robertos empire finds itself in hock to sleazy drug dealers, widening the scope of PURA SANGREs design of tragedy. Ospinas vision of evil can barely even be called satiric but nonetheless is, cutting both backwards and forwards in history.