Set in Medellín, 1987, a group of teen outcasts steals a news camera to document every detail of their dangerous lives. The first feature from acclaimed photographer and Bad Bunny music video director Stillz redefines the found footage genre as a haunting, poignant coming-of-age story with a disturbing twist. Featuring an awe-inspiring score by Arca and produced by Harmony Korine's collective EDGLRD, the film taps into the anxieties of a youth culture from the margins of history yearning to be understood.

"[A] story that acts as an ode to the power of telling stories on your own terms...works best when reconsidered as an immersive artifact from the marginalized who are learning the grammar of self-expression...a film that understands that the truest picture of society comes from the eyes of those it neglects, courtesy of the outcasts who plunder airtime from the State itself." - RogerEbert.com

"[A]n urban phantasmagoria out the lives of disaffected Colombian youths...examines adolescent ennui and the quotidian brutalities of poverty in the titular neighborhood through a neorealist yet also strangely extraterrestrial lens...[A] meandering meditation on the existential malaise of the economically dispossessed...Barrio Triste acknowledges that even if beauty cannot grant real power to these dispossessed youths, it still offers a glimpse of the dignity and transcendence that their circumstances have denied them." - Film Comment

 

"[A] film that is at once self-consciously experimental and intensely, almost uncomfortably earnest." - The New York Times

 

"Exhilarating, tense, personal, and enigmatic, Barrio Triste is a compelling look at a lost generation in search of salvation, and among this year’s best first features." - The Film Stage 

 

"A nightmarish odyssey into the depths of poverty and despair from Colombian-American director and photographer Stillz. [T]he director’s commitment to a realistic aesthetic never falters." - RogerEbert.com

 

"Engrossing, weird and wildly original...." - i-D Magazine

 

"[A] necessary viewing for those interested in that kind of Latin American cinema that takes on both a marginal theme and an experimental tone..." - Los Angeles Times en Español

 

"[S]o self-assured in its motley attitudes that it can’t help but impress." - In Review Online