‘The Kings Of The World’ Review: Laura Mora’s Colombian Oscar Entry

Colombian cinema has shown a ferocious loyalty to the country’s dispossessed: to the generation that lost its lands to exploitation and its moral moorings to the drug trade, to the kids who grew up parentless on the streets or found some kind of refuge in the militias that terrorized the country. It has also proved to be a hotbed of vibrant artistic experiment. Films such as Monos (2019) and La Jauria (2022), in which myth, magic and documentary observation collide and mingle, are notable for their untethered energy and complete disregard for prescribed categories. Stories are not so much told as imaginatively experienced. Perhaps, in a country with so few visible rules, anything is possible. 

Which brings us to Laura Mora’s The Kings of the World, about a volatile street hustler from Medellin who sets out to reclaim his grandmother’s stolen farm. It is a glorious film, pulsing with life. Ra (Carlos Andres Castaneda) hangs on street corners, trading bits of jewelry of dubious provenance and defending his younger homies from bullies. When official papers arrive that name him as the legal owner of the land lost during the cartels’ reign of terror, he sets out across country to claim it, four of his mates in tow.

These kids are not angels. They steal, pride themselves on their knife wounds and smash stuff because they can. They have, nevertheless, one great gift: their capacity for finding maximum fun in any moment. Hitching trucks across country, the young ones riding on top of the load while the older ones tie their bicycles to the trucks’ bumper bars to speed along behind, hooting with glee. The rolling farmland they pass through is full of the promise of new life. Even when they are cold or hungry, the boys still have energy to play-fight like puppies.

The journey itself is dangerous but full of marvels. As fog swirls around them, they stumble into places that hardly seem real: a brothel where the painted middle-aged prostitutes hold them to their ample bosoms like the mothers they no longer have; a boat that takes them downriver through jungle; a hermit’s shelter. Then there are moments when the whole edifice – story and characters – seems to slip from reality into a kind of dream. “In my own perfect world,” says Ra in a voiceover as the five boys gaze into a wall of fog, spaced out on some unidentified street drug, “if you don’t want to exist, you don’t have to.” An answering vision comes from Sere (Davison Flores), a boy with a withered arm. “Freedom… with the eternal ones always present.”

Terrible things happen, but there is the sense that these kids who grew up fighting with machetes expect terrible things. “These cows have it a lot easier than us!” remarks young Winny (Brahian Estven Acevedo), gazing at a herd munching on rich grasses. “But that’s the life we were given.” Nano (Cristian Campana), the only Black boy in the gang, is kidnapped at what seems to be a mission; the others simply accept that he is a casualty and run away into the jungle. Another older boy, Culebro (Cristian David), keeps baiting Ra with the flailing hostility of the stupid; even Medellin street kids have their deplorables, but they put up with him because that’s how gangs work. As Ra explains to the hermit, they have no one else. They are his family. “I want to take them somewhere where no one beats us up or humiliates or looks down on us.”

Shangri La, in other words. The happy valley that only exists in stories. People have been fighting over this land since the Conquistadores came seeking gold, a history that is still coursing through the veins of the present. The old people warn Ra that this place is more dangerous than it seems, that he should not tell anyone why he is there because predators are everywhere. These elderly guardians are shadowy beings themselves, maybe not even real; this is a country full of ghosts and ruins. 

No country for young men, you could say. “We were all right where we were,” shouts Culebro at a tense moment, when the boys are lost in the forest. But that isn’t true either. Their mission may turn out to be fruitless, as the old ones warn, but Ra – whose beautiful, pensive face is often seen in shaky hand-held close-up, the face of longing – is revealed as a classical hero, an Achilles born of Medellin’s festering underbelly. This journey is his destiny. That may sound unlikely, but Laura Mora’s formidable imagination makes it moving, beautiful and true.