THE RETURNED

Somewhere deep in the heartlands of Argentina, in a small town where the Nazi’s used to run a hospital that experimented on children, two boys and a girl return after they went missing for a day. Their parents should breathe a huge sigh of relief, but the kids are dirty and naked and do not utter a single word. Two have them have been horribly mutilated. Inspector Cohen is sent from the big city to the town to find out what happened. It turns out that a lot of the inhabitants have done things that do not bear the scrutiny of daylight. Cohen’s main suspect is the children’s teacher, who tells him that the kids have actually been murdered

Ivan Noel is a self-taught director known for his guerilla style movies that he always put on the internet for everyone to see. He soon got noticed by the festival circuit because of his consistent body of work that often deals with moral dilemmas and the psychology of children. His dramaturgy is as macabre as it is poetic. The Returned is like a Latin-American version of Les Revenants with a poignant social-political undercurrent.