{"id":131901,"date":"2024-06-14T11:00:13","date_gmt":"2024-06-14T10:00:13","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/?guid=0452c34e80561a784337e80c09137e91"},"modified":"2024-06-14T11:00:13","modified_gmt":"2024-06-14T10:00:13","slug":"sorcery-a-witch-trial-movie-with-a-magical-realist-twist","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/gamefootballmobileanimeiphone.com\/index.php\/2024\/06\/14\/sorcery-a-witch-trial-movie-with-a-magical-realist-twist\/","title":{"rendered":"Sorcery \u2013 A witch trial movie with a magical-realist twist"},"content":{"rendered":"
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I<\/span> don\u2019t know who you are anymore,\u201d says Agnes (Annick Dur\u00e1n) to Rosa (Valentina V\u00e9liz Caileo) a little way into Christopher Murray\u2019s Sorcery (Brujer\u00eda). Rosa is not so sure herself.<\/p>\n

A 13-year-old maid to German settlers on Chile\u2019s Chilo\u00e9 Island in 1881, Rosa has converted to Christianity, learnt German and become like her employers \u2013 the patriarch Stefan (Sebastian H\u00fclk), his wife Agnes and their young boys Thorsten (Mat\u00edas Bannister) and Franz (Iker Echevers) \u2013 whom she regards as her own family Yet when all the sheep on the property are stricken with a mysterious illness, Stefan suspects witchcraft, and sets his dogs on Rosa\u2019s father Juan (Francisco N\u00fa\u00f1ez), killing him.<\/p>\n

Unable to give Juan a Christian burial, and failing to get justice from either the Mayor (Daniel Mu\u00f1oz) or the Church, Rosa is taken in by Mateo (Daniel Antivilo), an indigenous elder with connections to the Huilliche secret society known as Recta Provincia. Sorcery is both rite of passage and revenge myth, as Rosa, on the cusp of adolescence, looks in the watery mirror, or in Mateo\u2019s eyes, and finds herself. \u201cSome people don\u2019t want to remember,\u201d she is told by Aurora Quinchen (Neddiel Mu\u00f1oz Millalonco), \u201cbut memories are plastered over everything.\u201d Aurora initiates Rosa into the island\u2019s traditional magic \u2013 and so Rosa strips away all the trappings of her assimilation to colonialism, and embraces her native inheritance and inner witch.<\/p>\n

Murray presents all the shapeshifting, body-swapping and baleful cursing in a strict mode of magical realism where naturalism rules and special effects are eschewed (apart from the odd apparently CGI-tweaked murmuration). This realism is important: for not only is the film\u2019s story, co-written by Murray with Pablo Paredes, loosely based on a real 1880s trial of Chilo\u00e9 indigenes charged with witchcraft, but the film\u2019s supernatural furnishings serve as metaphors for aboriginal identity.<\/p>\n

After all, Rosa, on her quest for justice and equal treatment, is not only returning to her cultural roots, but also undergoing a political radicalisation, as she sees the wrongs of her colonial masters and their compromised servants, and decides to fight back from her furtive \u201cstate within the state\u201d. Rosa is awakening not only to her environment, but to the injustices built into the prevailing system, as well as to her own status, class, ethnicity and hidden powers. Ultimately Sorcery is a film about land (and water). Mateo implies that Stefan\u2019s flock has been cursed because he built his farm on sacred earth.<\/p>\n

Rosa will learn from Mateo that Huilliches like her father \u201caren\u2019t heaven creatures, Huilliches are sea creatures\u201d, and she will reverse her Christian baptism with a more native water ceremony, while discovering the island\u2019s literal and metaphorical underground in a cave which, as Aurora only half-jokingly suggests, is located within herself. Here the island\u2019s geography and the natives\u2019 mythology merge into an overlapping mystery which will ultimately bring about the young woman\u2019s emergent self-knowledge, as she metamorphoses into a very different kind of adult.<\/p>\n<\/div>\n

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