It is a reimagining of Borges's story "The South," an emblematic tale of the schism that has plagued South America's republics for almost two centuries: between the capital cities with their totems to European culture, and the vast, serenely violent countryside that surrounds them.
"Up to now there has been very little aid to the poor," said Jaime Garcia, a 42-year-old part-time construction worker who fled the violent countryside with his wife and seven children more than a year ago.
With incisively observed action, quietly cruel dialogue, and a flood of hallucinatory images, Decker conveys the terrifying force of sexual desire and the violent intimacy of family bonds; as filmed by the cinematographer Ashley Connor, the characters, the wild countryside, and even the sinewy livestock seem to shudder with reckless passion.
He censored the press, shackled the courts, terrorized Protestants, and caused violent rebellion in the countryside.
Only in the English countryside could violent death remain something that is "cosy".
The number of murders has fallen steadily, to two-thirds its level of 2003, but parts of Colombia's cities and countryside remain violent.
But violent rebellion, especially in the countryside, where trouble is brewing once again, has been a feature of Chinese history for thousands of years.
The release of a large number of unemployed, armed young men into the countryside bequeathed a violent legacy, and by 1982 the initial ZANU-ZAPU government coalition broke down in the face of increasing violence in Matabeleland, for which ZANU held ZAPU responsible.
This culture was characterized by a curious world of terramare, habitations built on pilings and protected by a vallum, or defensive wall, which screened them from floods (in the flat countryside, seasonal rains were violent).
In this photograph, Mr. Tejada said, the kilns used for the production of bricks in the Mexican countryside suggest the same violent destruction that took place in the New World encounter between Spanish colonizers and the native civilizations of Mexico.
Set in the years just following WWI, Thornton takes us on a journey deep into the Australian wilderness, and I don't just mean the harsh countryside but also the violent men who inhabited it.
