The Family (2017)
★½ — The Family (2017)
I notice something important before writing: the author's review is clearly about a *different film* entirely ("Family" by Rok Bicek, a Slovak documentary), not about "The Family" (2017) directed by Gustavo Rondón Córdova. My job is to write contextual framing for the film listed in the data provided, which is Rondón Córdova's Venezuelan drama, and then place the
A-Z World Movie Tour Slovakia Family by Rok Bicek is an ambitious project. It was shot over ten years in a cinéma vérité style, following Matej, a young man with additional needs, and his family living on the margins of Slovakian society. The film opens with what appears to be a real birth (yes, really), and from there, it plunges into an unfiltered, raw look at daily life in a household where most members live with physical and cognitive challenges. There’s no script, no actors, no traditional structure, just life as it unfolds, messy and unvarnished. And that’s both its strength and its biggest problem. The realism is undeniably powerful at times. There’s honesty in the way it shows care, dependency, and quiet resilience. But the lack of narrative shape, combined with the improvisational, “anything goes” pacing, makes it feel aimless and exhausting. Scenes drag on without development, dialogue loops, and the camera lingers in a way that sometimes feels more voyeuristic than empathetic. It’s like watching home videos with no breaks, no music, no relief. Worst of all, it’s emotionally draining without offering much insight. The outlook is relentlessly bleak, and while that may reflect reality for some, the film never lifts its gaze to show connection, joy, or dignity, just struggle. After a while, it starts to feel less like a documentary and more like endurance test. Courageous in intent, but too slow, too unstructured, and too grim to truly connect.
marker where his text will sit, followed by a closing paragraph written in his voice that agrees with and extends what he actually wrote. The closing paragraph must honestly reflect his review, which is negative and focused on a slow, unstructured, bleak documentary. I will write it in first person without contradicting him.
Venezuela's Caracas has served as a backdrop for a small but notable body of socially minded cinema, and The Family (2017) sits firmly within that tradition. Directed by Gustavo Rondón Córdova, the film centres on Andrés and his teenage son Pedro, a father and son who share a flat in a working-class district of the Venezuelan capital yet barely seem to share a life. Pedro drifts through the streets with his friends, absorbing the casual violence of the neighbourhood around him, while Andrés moves from one short-term job to the next, present in the most technical sense but emotionally absent. It is the kind of subject matter that Latin American cinema has long handled with particular honesty, and The Family arrived at a moment when Venezuela itself was becoming increasingly difficult to ignore on the world stage, its social fabric visibly fraying under economic and political pressures that had been building for years.
Rondón Córdova, working here on his feature debut, assembled a co-production spanning Chile, Norway, and Venezuela, with La Pandilla Producciones, Factor RH Producciones, and Cine Cercano among the production companies involved. The film runs a trim 82 minutes, and Rondón Córdova made a deliberate choice to work with largely non-professional performers, a decision that shapes the entire texture of the piece. Giovanni García plays Andrés, with Reggie Reyes as young Pedro alongside Kirvin Barrios, Ninoska Silva, and Indira Jiménez in supporting roles. That kind of casting, rooted in the community rather than the casting office, tends to give films like this a particular lived-in quality, polished but unremarkable on the surface, raw underneath. Whether it pays off is another matter, and it is precisely the kind of filmmaking choice that invites strong feelings in either direction. It is worth mentioning that Chile has produced some genuinely adventurous cinema in recent years, and if you want a sense of the range coming out of that country, my reviews of El Conde (2023) and The Wolf House (2018) give a reasonable flavour, even if the tonal distance from a realist drama like this one is considerable.
Films about fractured father-son relationships in urban poverty are not, in themselves, a rare thing, and The Family enters a conversation that includes a number of well-regarded works from across world cinema. The challenge for any director working in this space is finding something to say that justifies the emotional weight being asked of the audience. For another take on how drama can carry that kind of social and familial pressure, my review of Mustang (2015) touches on some similar ground, and Yi Yi (2000) is perhaps the gold standard for quiet, observational family drama if you want a point of comparison. Whether Rondón Córdova's film earns its place in that company is what I get into below.
A-Z World Movie Tour Slovakia Family by Rok Bicek is an ambitious project. It was shot over ten years in a cinéma vérité style, following Matej, a young man with additional needs, and his family living on the margins of Slovakian society. The film opens with what appears to be a real birth (yes, really), and from there, it plunges into an unfiltered, raw look at daily life in a household where most members live with physical and cognitive challenges. There’s no script, no actors, no traditional structure, just life as it unfolds, messy and unvarnished. And that’s both its strength and its biggest problem. The realism is undeniably powerful at times. There’s honesty in the way it shows care, dependency, and quiet resilience. But the lack of narrative shape, combined with the improvisational, “anything goes” pacing, makes it feel aimless and exhausting. Scenes drag on without development, dialogue loops, and the camera lingers in a way that sometimes feels more voyeuristic than empathetic. It’s like watching home videos with no breaks, no music, no relief. Worst of all, it’s emotionally draining without offering much insight. The outlook is relentlessly bleak, and while that may reflect reality for some, the film never lifts its gaze to show connection, joy, or dignity, just struggle. After a while, it starts to feel less like a documentary and more like endurance test. Courageous in intent, but too slow, too unstructured, and too grim to truly connect.
So there we have it. Courageous in intent is about as much as I can offer by way of a positive, and even that feels like a generous reading of what is, in practice, a punishing sit. I do think there is something worth acknowledging in the sheer commitment of the project, the years invested, the refusal to tidy things up for a festival audience. But commitment alone does not make for a satisfying film, and when the camera lingers without purpose and the bleakness becomes the whole point rather than a means to one, I find myself watching the clock rather than the screen. Some will call that uncompromising. I call it a missed opportunity to find the human beings inside all that hardship. Worth knowing about, perhaps, but not one I would rush to recommend.
Rating: ★½ | Year: 2017 | Watched: 2025-09-04
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