Wild Tales is one of the five 2015 Oscar nominees for Best Foreign Film. It lost out to the movie Ida (the 2015 Oscar winner for Best Foreign Film).
Inequality, injustice and the demands of the world we live in cause stress and depression for many people.
Some of them, however, explode.
Wild Tales is a movie about those people.
Vulnerable in the face of a reality that shifts and suddenly turns unpredictable, the characters of Wild Tales cross the thin line that divides civilization and barbarism.
A lover’s betrayal, a return to the repressed past and the violence woven into everyday encounters drive the characters to madness as they cede to the undeniable pleasure of losing control.
The director of Wild Tales, Damián Szifron, in his own words: These tales sprang from the most unrestrained corners of the imagination. While I was working to develop other projects often dispirited by the fact that they were impossible to realize I began writing a series of short stories to vent my frustrations. When I put them together in one volume, I realized that they were connected by a series of themes that provided unity and coherence: they were all about catharsis, vengeance and destruction. And the undeniable pleasure of losing control. I frequently think of Western capitalist society as a sort of transparent cage that reduces our sensitivity and distorts our bonds with others. Wild Tales presents a group of individuals who live within this cage without being aware of its existence. But at that point where most of us would repress or get depressed, these people shift into gear. This involuntary project came together so quickly that it rose on my list of priorities and found a framework for production. The telling of multiple stories represented an act of liberation for me, because it brought me back to falling in love with reading. I remember it as if it were yesterday: discovering in the family library a set of fiction anthologies that got my attention: Tales by the Masters of Crime, Tales by the Master of Mystery, and Tales by the Masters of Terror. Later would come “Amazing Stories” (produced by Spielberg), “New York Stories” (by Scorsese, Coppola and Woody Allen) and J.D. Salinger’s “Nine Stories”. The paths that all of these works forged in my consciousness configured my current space for creative liberty and experimentation.
