USA: AMERICAN PREMIERE OF OSCAR NOMINATED LATIN AMERICAN FILM " AMORE PERROS"

Record ID: 391180

  • Title: USA: AMERICAN PREMIERE OF OSCAR NOMINATED LATIN AMERICAN FILM " AMORE PERROS"
  • Date: 27th March 2001
  • Summary: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES (MARCH 27, 2001) (REUTERS) SMV (SOUNDBITE) (Spanish) VANESSA BAUCHE SAYING, "It talks about a place in which there are many types of people, many kinds of love, many possibilities of not finding love, and it's a country where relationships are affected by the hysteria in the world in which they're living."
  • Embargoed: 11th April 2001 13:00
  • Keywords:
  • Location: LOS ANGELES, CALIFORNIA, UNITED STATES
  • Country: USA
  • Topics: General
  • Reuters ID: LVAEE8ILPYERDC3SN25ATHOST72P
  • Story Text: The Academy Award-nominated "Amores Perros" had its U.S. premiere in Los Angeles, California surrounded by plenty of Hollywood buzz as Mexican director Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu is being talked about as an important up-and-comer in Latin American filmmaking.
    Hailed by film critics and audiences as one of the most important films of the year, the U.S. premiere of Amores Perros (Love's a Bitch) in Los Angeles was giving a warm welcome by Hollywood.
    Alejandro Gonzalez Iñarritu, the film's director, explains the film as a bold and intensely emotional story of lives that collide in a Mexico City car crash.
    The movie explores characters who are catapulted into dramatic circumstances instigated by the seemingly-nconsequential destiny of a dog named Cofi.
    The film is a triptych, the three stories woven together by the themes of love, life, and death, as told through metaphor, with dogs representing their owners.
    In the first vignette, "Octavio and Susanna," Cofi's teenage owner (Gael Garcia Bernal) enters his dog into the brutal world of dogfighting in order to earn money for his elopement with his brother's young, pregnant wife (Vanessa Bauche).
    In "Daniel and Valeria," a middle-aged businessman (Jorge Salinas) leaves his wife and children for a romance with a beautiful young model (Goya Toledo) who is transformed by a tragic car accident.
    The third story is of "El Chivo and Maru." El Chivo, a revolutionary-turned assassin, witnesses the car crash and finds that it leads him to an unexpected and life-altering moral epiphany.
    Gonzalez Iñarritu finds it impossible to imagine "Amores Perros" without dogs. No other animal could have had the same impact or meaning in the film.
    "We use dogs in this film because I believe they are they animals which are closest to us in nature," he says. Our animal nature is worse than theirs, because we kill for money, ambition and power, while dogs kill only to survive."
    The film's violence, while not gratuitous, has turned off some critics and turned away some movie-goers.
    With the bloody and taboo world of dog fighting figuring prominently in the film, Iñarritu assures critics that no harm was done to the dogs in filming and that the graphic scenes were necessary to make the movie realistic.
    In the end, the film is more about love and life, than about violence -- although Iñarritu's message is certainly that brutality is reality and that love itself is brutal. In fact, "Amores Perros," loosely translated, mean "love is a bitch."
    ---ENDS---
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