Dark, cartoonish and beautifully shot in black and white, Sapir's surreal homage to silent film noir is a refreshing surprise to come out of Spanish language film. In a Fritz Lang landscape, a brutal dictator has stolen the voices of his city and forces them to eat his brand of TV food. One singer and her strangely disfigured son keep their voices - used to lovely effect in a few rare songs - but when she is kidnapped, a TV repairman heads to the city's last-known aerial to thwart the tyrant and restore the city to normal.
Assured and imaginative, Sapir has the same comic lightness of touch and imaginative brilliance as Tim Burton and Terry Gilliam, with Leo Sujatovich's superb score underlining every moment perfectly. This is an enjoyably quirky, intriguingly directed sci-fi fantasy that blends comics, silent movies, Flash Gordon serials, musicals and tons of other sources to deliver both an exciting story and an important message. Unmissable.
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