Wandering Girl

In the start of Wandering Girl, four sisters rest their hands on a coffin that belong to their recently deceased father. He was clearly a womaniser, as the girls have different mothers, and in recent years only the youngest daughter, 12 year-old Angela, has lived with him. As one of the other thirty-something sisters comments: “I don’t know how to miss my father, I have missed him all my life.”

Wandering Girl is the best film you will see this year about mourning. It follows the four sisters as they travel across Colombia to see Angela off in her new life together with a distant aunt. As they get more familiar with each other, the older ones start teaching Angela about the kind of suffering life places on you, and the kind you can actually avoid. Such as men.

It is probably a deliberate choice from director Rubén Mendoza to place the men in the film firmly in the background. Absent fathers are a well-known trope in Latin-American cinema, but the film does not offer an explicit treatment of the subject. It is a funny, touching, beautifully well-observed and often very intimate film in which even the mandatory “I got my first period”-scene feels natural. The style is quite realistic, but also leaves room for scenes involving dancing excavators and dreams about travelling through the jungle along a railroad track. All this in only 75 minutes screening time.

Rubén Mendoza (b. 1980) is a director and screenwriter who studied at the Colombian national film school. One of his first shorts, La Cerca, was picked for the Cannes film festival programme, and his first feature film won a number of awards. Mendozas film Tierra en la lengua (Dust on the Tongue) has previously been shown at the Films from the South festival.