Barrio Triste is One of the Year’s Great Debuts

At barely two years old, Harmony Korine’s “post-cinema” company EDGLRD is already branching out. After directing AGGRO DR1FT and Baby Invasion, Korine takes on a producer role for Barrio Triste, the feature debut of Colombian-American artist Stillz. It’s a good match of talents, given Stillz’s background as a music video director for artists like Bad Bunny and Rosalia, and while Barrio Triste takes a vibes-based approach à la Korine’s last two features it’s an entirely different beast. Exhilarating, tense, personal, and enigmatic, Barrio Triste is a compelling look at a lost generation in search of salvation, and among this year’s best first features.

Named after its setting, an impoverished Medellín neighborhood associated with addiction and drug-related violence, Barrio Triste frames itself as a found-footage film from the late 1980s. Its opening shows a news anchor reporting on claims of strange lights and sounds in the area when a group of four teenage boys rush them and steal the camera. From that point on the film belongs to them, and they use this camera to document their day-to-day activities––including violent crimes, like a jewelery store robbery that goes awry when one of the guys gets trigger-happy.

That robbery scene, one of several standout sequences, quickly establishes the harsh, violent environment where these characters have to survive. Shot in a lengthy single take, it starts with the gang filming themselves in a car as they head to the store. They sit in silence, unfazed as the radio plays a call-in show where the hosts interview a man who claims to be a serial killer responsible for murdering local prostitutes. The hosts try to psychologize the killer by asking him questions about his childhood to no avail (the caller eventually admits he’s high) while Arca’s ominous score ramps up the tension until it explodes in deafening walls of noise once the boys head into the store. 

When the scene ends, its chaos stopping as abruptly as it started, Stillz changes gears entirely, going from abrasive to immersive. After making it back home, the camera quietly wanders the streets and buildings, catching glimpses at various goings-on: a group of kids watching static on a TV, a punk band jamming out, a mother expressing concerns about her son getting into trouble. Stillz adds the occasional surreal imagery, e.g. the cameraman opening a front door to reveal a horse. This observational approach lets Barrio Triste take on a more deliberate pace than the kinetic moments of its opening, but the film maintains an unpredictability from one moment to the next. Stillz’s construction of the barrio’s passages and alleyways comes from a place of affection, and in these moments suggests there are entire worlds of perspectives and experiences if anyone were to look for them.

Stillz extends that sensitivity to his characters, which, given their lives on the fringes of society, is a privilege they can’t afford. The film periodically cuts to one-on-one interviews with members of the group, who stare the camera down while speaking about their dreams, the future, or how they feel about death; at one point someone breaks down as they wish to feel the kind of love his parents never provided. These scenes deliberately break the film’s internal logic––we have no context for these moments––but outside of these moments, there are no opportunities for them to show vulnerability. “Maybe our memories will survive,” one of them tells the camera, a line that shows their resignation to never having a life they wanted.

As the camera gradually drifts back into focus on the gang, who kick off their nighttime partying by trashing and burning a car, Stillz scales up the extremes his film operates within. Between the violence and vulnerability, the chaos and stillness––all of it amplified by Arca’s excellent soundtrack––Barrio Triste turns to the spiritual in its final act, where the film evokes heaven and hell through cryptic imagery and horror elements. And if the only outcome is salvation or damnation, then Barrio Triste represents the purgatory these young people inhabit, a place overlooking a city they will always exist outside of. 

Barrio Triste screened at TIFF 2025.