Emilio Mayorga Chile’s Germán Acuña, director of 2020 Annecy standout “Nahuel and the Magic Book,” has set his sophomore effort with “The Devil’s Vein,” a sort of “fantasy Latin American western,” according to the filmmaker.Set at the height of the mining boom in the Atacama Desert of the 1920s, “The Devil’s Vein” follows Mercedes, a humble 16-year girl who decides to steal a mysterious piece of gold.
She hopes to use it to negotiate for the life of her brother who has gotten himself in trouble with the mineral’s true owner: the devil under the desert.The Atacama Desert was the world’s major natural supply of sodium nitrate (Chile’s “saltpeter”), large-scale mined until the early 1940s.
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