Featuring a roster of non-professional actors, Laura Mora’s San Sebastián-bound “The Kings of the World” (“Los Reyes del Mundo”) follows a group of five boys, aged 12 to 19, who find a sense of community together while wandering the streets of Medellín, Colombia. Variety debuted the film’s trailer in an exclusive.
As Rá, the leader and eldest member of the group, explains in the spot, “They’re my family. They’ve got nobody. Me neither. We’re alone, all of us.”
The boys dream of finding, or creating, a place to call their own. “In my own perfect world, if you don’t want to exist, you don’t have to,” one boy muses. Another offers, “I don’t wanna fall asleep, I don’t wanna get old.” Someone else describes, “I’d like to be invisible, like a shadow.”
When Rá receives a letter informing him about the restitution of land that was stolen from his grandmother by the paramilitary, the boys believe they have finally found their special place. But, unfortunately, their journey still has some obstacles. “The land is, in fact, yours,” Rá is informed, “but these things aren’t that easy.”
Mora directs and the film’s producers are Cristina Gallego (“Birds of Passage”) and Mirlanda Torres (“Manos sucias”).
Mora told Variety that she first had the idea for “The Kings of the World” during the casting of her previous feature, “Killing Jesus,” about a young woman searching for the man who murdered her father. “I realized that those more than 90 boys we interviewed all shared a terrible feeling of exclusion, a certainty of not having a future,” the filmmaker recalled. “However, almost like a deep and beautiful contradiction, they were full of life, sometimes delusional dreams, always linked to the same desire: an obsession with having a place in the world, literally and symbolically.”
Miniseries “Frontera Verde,” documentary “Código Origen,” feature “Antes del fuego,” and episodes of “Pablo Escobar: El Patrón del Mal” are among Mora’s other directorial credits.
“The Kings of the World” will screen in Competition at the San Sebastián International Film Festival, set to take place September 16-24. It will be released in Colombia October 6.
