Blood-Red Ox
The world is on fire, and so is the on/off relationship of journalist Amir and his boyfriend Amat, invited to Bolivia by Amir’s friend Amancaya and conducted through the rainforest to document the ecosystem they call “the Water Factory” by her brother Amaru, the alien environment and the unspoken hostility of the locals, understandably wary of outsiders, prompting unsettling nightmares in Amat.
Haunted by an accident just after their arrival at Tarija, a farmer’s ox struck by a car which forced Amancaya to euthanise the suffering animal, he dreams of blood and fire and of a demonic figure with horns, his behaviour becoming erratic first in small ways, stripping off to bathe in an icy-cold mountain spring, but degrading rapidly, failing to recognise Amir and becoming violent.
Paralleling troubled times and relationships and the Incan mythology of Pachamama, the earth-mother fertility goddess whose anger can only be soothed by sacrifice, Blood-Red Ox is directed by Rodrigo Bellott from a script co-written by Nate Atkins which is part hallucinatory parable and part lecture on conservation and the global importance of the rainforest threatened by predatory developers.
The different trees wrapped around each other in a symbiotic relationship as co-dependent as Amir and Amat (Mazin Akar and Kaolin Bass), Amancaya (Andrea Camponovo) believes that the forest fire of 2017 in which her mother died was started deliberately, Amat also confessing to Amir the secrets he has kept of his own mother’s death, her history of schizophrenia and the burden it placed upon him.
Amat’s psychotic break echoed in previous episodes glimpsed in flashback, the timeline is soon as confused as the characters who blend into one another as dialogue is repeated and he soon becomes as lost in his mind as he is in the rainforest, his shadow sprouting the horns of the demon as he becomes possessed by either madness or monster.
A downward spiral of despair bathed in red and shrouded in abstract imagery, deeply felt but impenetrable, despite the attractive and compelling leads the substance of Blood-Red Ox is little more than smoke and mirrors, asking for an emotional investment in the characters and their relationship based on deceptions, a foundation as ephemeral and unknowable as the river of clouds which passes above.
Blood-Red Ox available on digital download now
