The Exiles (Los Tortuga)

TORONTO INTERNATIONAL FILM FESTIVAL 2024 REVIEW! Outside in the parts of the world that are not Hollywood, the boundaries of hard drama keep expanding farther, like in the outstanding sophomore feature The Exiles (Los Tortuga) by director Belen Funes. Written by Funes and Marcal Cebrian, it opens with an olive harvest out in the countryside in Spain. Anabel (Elvira Lara) is helping beat the olives out of the trees that her father, Julian, left her when he died suddenly. Her father’s family shares with her the tradition of dipping bread into the first batch of oil from the pressed olives, and Anabel rubs some of the oil on her grandmother’s cheeks. They tell Anabel stories about how her father was a country boy but had to go to the big city. It was there in Barcelona where Julian met Anabel’s mother, Delia (Antonia Zegers), who had moved there from Chile.

Delia arrives at the family party in the taxi she drives for a living in the city, bearing scuba masks from Santa Claus for the wee ones. Anabel is going to study film at the University, so she will be leaving the country to go live with Delia in the city. Before she leaves, her Aunt Ines (Mamen Camacho) takes her to a shrine for her father, where Anabel leaves a lock of her hair. This infuriates Delia, who argues with Ines about filling her daughter’s head with superstitious nonsense. Ines defends the rituals, saying that they help her deal and they help Anabel as well.

“…Anabel is going to study film at the University…”

Things soon go bad in the city, where Delia barely scrapes by. While Anabel is busy in production classes, the floor drops out and Delia gets an eviction notice. Because she owns her own cab and lives hand to mouth, Delia does not have the necessary paychecks she is required to present to potential landlords. Anabel’s bright horizons are quickly changing into oncoming pavement.

The films that thrill me the most are either hyper-stylized outlandishness or genuinely realistic. Director Funes is a master of reality, in that she is highly skilled at recreating true realism onscreen. There are times where The Exiles is so real that you can feel the air around the characters on the hairs of your arms. This degree of grittiness attained can’t be attributed to just the camera angle choices or the length of takes.