Just after Christmas I actually met someone who worked for what I believe is New Zealand’s only ‘contamination clean up’ company operating within the medical sphere, a job which I found both fascinating and quite frankly, on the dangerous side. In the age of Ebola outbreaks it’s definitely a specialty field and one that although unattractive must be quite lucrative, and the fact that they were quickly expanding into Australia certainly confirmed the latter. It made me think about the sort of job descriptions that the average person shies away from for all manner of reasons, and wonder what kind of person is attracted to the profession or just wakes up one day doing the kind of job that most of us would rather pretend doesn’t exist.

One of those people is Eusebio Vela (played by the amazing Víctor Prada), the main protagonist in the beautiful but odd film El Limpiador – AKA ‘The Cleaner’. Eusebio’s job as a forensic cleaner is to sterlise places where someone has died, and he is the busiest he has ever been since the outbreak of a mysterious epidemic that has the city of Lima, Peru in its grips. Eusebio is a lonely and seemingly apathetic man to the pain around him. He has essentially been desensitized by his line of work and goes about his business without a care in the world. One day, while cleaning an abandoned house of the detritus of death, he comes across a scared boy hiding in a wardrobe. It is immediately obvious that he is the child of the deceased, and Eusebio takes it upon himself to find the boy's remaining family. He convinces the terrified child that donning a cardboard box will keep him safe from the horrors that lie outside on the streets, and the hunt begins together for a future in a hopeless place.

The film follows Eusebio as he takes charge of the child and tries to look after him in a slowly dying city, with the thriving metropolis in the grip of an apocalypse and a deadly epidemic debilitating the population. Some reviewers and pointy-headed film fans have likened the situation in this futuristic Lima to the state of the human mind in a fragile emotional state, but I took it for what it was – a warning about what the world could quite easily become if we cease to care. It’s a thought provoking and solemn watch with loneliness and death at its heart, but an extremely worthy watch all the same.

As a bit of background, the film is actually the feature film debut of relative newcomer Adrian Saba – it makes it all the more extraordinary given that the creator of such a moving film is still under 30. Born in Madrid in 1988 to a Peruvian father and Dutch mother, as a teenager he landed a Fulbright scholarship to study Film at Hofstra University (New York). In 2010 he graduated from his studies with the thesis short film El río, which was presented at festivals the world over, where it won numerous awards. In 2011 he founded Flamingo Films in order to produce his projects and was invited shortly afterwards to join La Gris Films as one of its leading directors.

So, the slow yet mesmerising EL LIMPIADOR is one of my favourite watches of the year thus far, and a film I can’t believe I didn’t know of before being given it to review here. Oh what I was missing! Don’t be the same and make sure to catch this sad, beautiful tale as told through the eyes of two extremely memorable characters.

Screening Times:
14/01/2015 08:30pm
18/01/2015 11:35pm
06/02/2015 02:20pm