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The Delay

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María lives with her three school-age children and 80-year-old father, Agustín. It’s clearly a struggle for her to make ends meet and to juggle all of her commitments. Agustín has periods of lucidity, but his mental deterioration is such that Maria explores the possibility of his either living with another relative or moving into some kind of care facility. When both of these options seem imposible, María makes a drastic decision.

Selected as Uruguay’s entry for the 2013 Academy Awards, Rodrigo Plá’s narrative accuracy gets audiences involved in this simple story with no false notes. Far from the notion of dysfunctional family American cinema has transformed into a tight system of clichés, The Delay moves far beyond the realm of black and white, employing a subtle variation of grays, underlining what becomes the film’s central theme: the intense, painful ambivalence of family responsibility.

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