PVC-1

A night in the Colombian countryside. A group of masked men break into a poor family's house. They put something on the mother, Ofelia: a bomb made from PVC pipe, locked around her neck. They demand a large sum from the family and leave. Ofelia has to find somebody who can get the bomb off. The nearest town is far away, there is no telephone, and nobody knows how to open a thing like this. The most striking thing about the film is how it was shot: all eighty-five minutes in a single take, without a cut. The camera leaves the house, crosses the fields, comes down to the road and stops nowhere; real time and film time are the same. Spiros Stathoulopoulos directed. The events are real: in 2000 a woman in Colombia had a bomb fixed around her neck in exactly this way. The film screened at Cannes in 2007. The title comes from the name of that pipe.