Land and Shade: the ties that bind, love, belonging and family – a film review

One of the most powerful films you will see this year is Land and Shade (Tierra y Sombra). The 2015 winner of the prestigious Cannes Caméra d’or, the movie is simple but has that subtle quality of getting under your skin. The story revolves around very few characters, a family in the Valle de Cauca region in Colombia. It is a low-income family: the matriarch Alicia (Hilda Ruiz) and her daughter-in-law (Marleyda Soto) work in a sugar plantation in a brutal environment for very low wages. The matriarch’s son Gerardo (Edison Raigosa) has fallen ill of some sort of respiratory illness. Bed-ridden, he can no longer work on the plantation. Gerardo’s wife steps up to his job while taking care of him and their 6-year-old son. The action is set in motion when his estranged father Alfonso (Haimer Leal) returns to enter the constrained family dynamic.