This year at the open of Palm Springs Film Festival, 2011, I started my first film screening day with the Latin American
Oscar Buzz Award film for Chile: Matias Bize's 'La Vida de los Peces' (The Life of Fish)
This film was so perfect and heart rendering that I spent the rest of the festival having seen one of the best of the fest on the first day...
What can I say?

'The Life of Fish' is about a young man, Andres (played by Santiago Cabrera), who returns home to Santiago, Chile after
living overseas in Europe for ten years. This film is charged with explosive feelings of nostalgia and regret as Andres
faces all the characters from his past at a homecoming during his brother's birthday party where he encounters
the long lost love of his life, Beatriz, played by the luminous Chilean actress Blanca Lewin.

Santiago and Beatriz relive their past together through a realistically slow and poetic communication first through longing
expressions and broken dialogue, accompanied by a haunting and brilliant musical score by composer Diego Fontecilla.
As the film progresses, their communication flows forth until all the pent up truths of their feelings about a bygone past
are exposed. But can these two soul mates reconnect and come back together, swim back upstream to pick up where
they left off ten years ago? Or have they swum too far down the river of life to go backwards?

Filmed with gorgeous cinematography as though behind a fish tank, full of color, emotion and lyrical music, this film is
simply stunning and nothing short of perfection in its artistry. Marvelous and beautiful! Thank you Matias!

written by, Vanessa McMahon   January 18, 2011

see trailer here: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=XB2RTx3IsqA

director Matias Bize