AllMovie

In 1978, a Chilean thief named Alberto Candia entered the grand Cádiz Cathedral in southern Spain, and, it is believed, stole priceless ancient artifacts before being tracked down and killed. In Chilean filmmaker Francisco Rodríguez Teare’s form-defying feature debut, the maybe-true tale of Candia provides the unstable center of an absorbing inquiry into mythmaking, following a pair of young thieves across the Atacama Desert as they meet a community of local prospectors digging for gold. Through stories that seem to be real and others that can only be fantasy, Teare’s inventive film constantly shifts the borders between truth and fable, while presenting to the viewer the staggering, vast beauty of the mountains, beaches, and rivers of Atacama and Andalusia.