Critics reviews

Acevedo's strong debut is a visual stunner, featuring blankets of falling ash and dense widescreen vistas. Lateral tracking shots help convey an intimate sense of distance and scale. The film peaks during a wordless last supper where a child's tears communicate volumes of pent-up sadness.

[Land and Shade] feels nearly otherworldly in its isolation... It doesn’t push an obvious sense of claustrophobia, and the house isn’t merely a prison. It’s a past that needs breaking.

“Land and Shade” is a film of uncommon restraint and considerable compassion. It presents a seemingly helpless situation and focuses on the tiny, fleeting moments of regret, resentment, reconciliation, hope, loyalty and love within and between these characters.

When it focuses on the workers, the movie resembles the films of John Sayles, who often juxtaposes a family drama with an expansive sociological portrait. In "Land and Shade," the setting holds more interest than the plot: a fable-like, elemental story that sketches its characters too faintly to develop much power.

Acevedo props stunning images of man's despairing relationship to the land on the barest of narrative bones, mostly a collection of long shots of characters trying to endure existence without completely shattering.

Wrenching and contemplative... Where “Land And Shade” shines is in its outrage, and the heartbroken fury at the center of the film.

There are moments of quiet reprieve amid the purgatorial ash, like the returned teaching his grandson different birdsongs or shielding his ice cream cone as a dust-spewing truck rumbles by. You might not want to live here, but the imagery makes for a nice postcard.

Acevedo has a wonderful command of visual storytelling... Though Land And Shade is too detached at times in its approach to environmental and human devastation, Acevedo does effectively capture the sense of Alfonso having just arrived in an alien landscape.

Land And Shade is a portrait of a dying way of life, a land gradually being abandoned with no-one knowing what may come after... From silence and small details, César Augusto Acevedo weaves a devastating tale.

...The challenge pays off handsomely: Land and Shade includes stunning photography of backbreaking labor, with portraits of laborers whose finely chiseled features and unadorned directness recall in their austerity Walker Evans's Let Us Now Praise Famous Men, or Sebastião Salgado's goldmine portfolio.

Through its images alone, Acevedo's fine first effort is a cumulatively impressive, if overall muted, take on one murky dwelling crippled by the raging, top-down hostilities of capitalism.

Beautifully-shot [and] artistically uncompromising... [Acevedo] marks himself out as a name to watch... [The director] is certainly as preoccupied with image as he is [with] content and it is perhaps the individual frames and tableaux which linger on past this resolutely-downbeat, emblematic story.