Cinephile № 814 “Song Without a Name”

Recommendation: 4/5 STARS, SHOWTIME

Plot: “Georgina’s newborn daughter is stolen at a fake health clinic. Her desperate search for the child leads her to the headquarters of a major newspaper, where she meets a lonely journalist who takes on the investigation.” -IMDB

Review: For my 7th film of the 2019 AFI Fest, I went searching for something with the same breathtaking power of “Roma.” With “Song Without a Name,” I landed on a film that began with a people devastated by the revolution in Peru and ended with a woman’s desperate search for her stolen child. The revolution serves as the undercurrent for everything we experience and Georgina (Pamela Mendoza) finds herself pregnant in this harsh world. With the intersection of these two realities as our foundation, what follows is a quiet character study evolving into one of the most memorable films I saw last year.

Much like “Roma,” one of the first things you will notice about this film is the absence of color. I think the choice to film in black and white is more than a stylistic choice. In my opinion, I believe it is meant to convey the bleak, desperate, and sorrowing times in which our main character finds herself living. This pain reaches its height when a pregnant Georgina heads into the city to give birth to her child. During the course of childbirth and resting from the…