The Lips

Three women medics, Noe (Eva Bianco), Luchi (Victoria Raposo) and Coca (Adela Sánchez), leave the city for an impoverished hamlet in the Santa Fé province to treat and advise a population trapped by scarce resources, poor sanitation and limited education. The local inhabitants (all non-professional actors) recount their tales nonchalantly. At the end of the day the three women return to the derelict hospital that serves as their makeshift accommodation, where its spectres come into play as they wind down and prepare for bed. Different layers of fiction intervene to show all three coping in their different ways with the legacy of what they have seen and heard. Camerawork and editing avoid sensationalising or censoring the first-person testimony of the local community.

The result is a compelling and audacious poetic encounter: an anthropological cinema vérité that avoids voyeurism in favour of a more measured (and refreshingly unsentimental) consideration of the boundaries between the authentic and the staged.