The films of Nelson Carlo de Los Santos Arias (b. 1985) are shapeshifting objects that rarely stay in one place for long—not unlike the Dominican-born director himself, who studied cinema in Mexico, Argentina, Scotland and the United States before settling in Berlin in 2019. Similarly restless, de Los Santos Arias’ wide-ranging body of work hopscotches between continents as nimbly as it incorporates different film formats and narrative traditions, ranging from speculative fiction to experimental ethnography. Stylistic breadth notwithstanding, a number of themes run throughout his filmography, namely colonialism, cultural memory and language vis-à-vis his standing as a Caribbean artist living and working abroad. With his rhizomatic approach to history and storytelling, de Los Santos Arias—who shoots and edits his films himself—has developed a unique brand of political cinema in which the uncanny and fantastic freely intermingle with more concrete anthropological concerns, a process that has arguably reached its most vivid expression yet with his latest feature, Pepe (2024), which reimagines the life and death of one of Pablo Escobar’s notorious “cocaine hippos.”

De Los Santos Arias’ first two features, You Look Like a Carriage That Not Even the Oxen Can Stop (2013) and Santa Teresa and Other Stories (2015), like his philosophically framed 2014 short Lullabies, were made while attending CalArts, and together they reflect both the filmmaker’s budding formal ingenuity and his longstanding interest in marginalized communities. Set in New York and spoken almost entirely in Caribbean Spanish, You Look Like a Carriage takes place primarily in the apartment of de Los Santos Arias’ real-life aunt and cousin, with whom he films and commiserates as they struggle with the realities of being outsiders in an unwelcoming country. Santa Teresa, meanwhile, explodes its predecessor’s largely observational conceit through a combination of fact, fiction and fabulation. In this multivalent portrait of an imagined Mexican border city, the director meditates on violence and its representation by freely pulling from not only national history and local myth, but also from Chilean author Roberto Bolaño’s unfinished novel 2666.

Near the end of Santa Teresa, a young girl reads a passage from Bolaño’s book that evokes the experience of watching de Los Santos Arias’ films better than any straightforward description:

The style was strange.

The writing was clear

And sometimes even transparent.

But the stories that followed,

One after another,

Didn’t lead anywhere. […]

All that was really left was nature,

A nature that dissolved little by little,

In a boiling cauldron,

Until it vanished completely.

Nature indeed plays a key role in both Pepe and its predecessor, Cocote (2017). In the latter, a gardener returns from Santo Domingo to his rural hometown following the murder of his father. Over the course of a multiday mourning ritual—captured by de Los Santos Arias with verite-esque immediacy—the man is forced to reconcile his religious beliefs with the realization that his family expects him to avenge the killing. Despite its allusions to classic genre cinema, Cocote plays something like a hybrid of the director’s ethnographic and experimental impulses, a mode he expands into something nearly unclassifiable in Pepe. Applying Cocote’s dizzying mix of textures, formats and narrative flights of fancy to a true-to-life tale of colonial violence, de Los Santos Arias presents the plight of the eponymous pachyderm not as a mere stranger-than-fiction fable, but as an allegory for the ongoing exploitation and misrepresentation of the Global South. As with all of de Los Santos Arias’ work, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts, but that doesn’t make the parts any less thrilling to behold. – Jordan Cronk