REVIEW
HowMONOSdirector
Alejandro Landes took on
the jungle — and won
Top left:The
teen guerrillas
of Colombia
fight their way
through the
dense forest.
Above:Director
Alejandro
Landes running
on almost empty.
Above right:
Moises Arias
cuts a stark
figure as
camouflaged
leader Bigfoot.
Right:Bigfoot
takes thecombat
underwater.
Jungle fever
MONOS, ALEJANDRO LANDES’ beautiful,
brutal dreamscape about a group of teen soldiers
in Latin America, is the real deal. Inspired by
Colombia’s interminable civil war, Landes
short-listed a gang of mostly non-actors, stuck
them in a boot camp, whittled them down to
the toughest of the tough, then shot the film at
first up a mountain, and then in a remote and
unforgiving jungle. That jungle was rough.
That jungle was tough. Landes tells us how he
pulled it off.
FINDING INTEL
For expert guidance, Landes hired Wilson
Salazar, a former child soldier. “He had risen to
the top of one of the most feared combat units
and he had deserted,” says Landes. “So he had
a price on his head. I asked him to come on as
a consultant. At first he was training the kids,
just like he’d trained other kids — he himself
had entered the guerrilla army when he was
11 years old. So he was training them on how
to move without making a sound, barefoot
formations. How to carry a weapon.” Impressed,
Landes then hired him to act in the film, too, as
‘The Messenger’, who gives the kids their orders.
Here, Salazar’s real-life experience really came
into play. “When he was shooting the proof-of-
life video, he was physically moved and he had
to step back. He said, ‘You know, this isn’t the
first time I’ve done this.’ Because he had held
a camera for real proof-of-life videos with
a kidnapped person in front of him.”HANDLING THE ELEMENTS
The jungle really brings the atmosphere to
Monos— it’s a terrifying paradise that practically
wafts off the screen. And there were no
shortcuts. “For the ambition we had, a very
stylised mise-en-scène, I knew it was going to be
very hard to pull off, and certainly we were at the
limit of what we could do,” says Landes. “We had
one satellite phone that worked every so often. Alamy