The feature that caught my attention the most about "Peri: The Girl with No Mouth" was its originality. While Western cinemas repeat themselves - not to exhaustion, but to the point of disgust (the eternal recycling of superheroes suggests a superlative creative crisis), the cinemas of Asia, Latin America and Africa possess an inexhaustible wealth, from very rich cultures, that do not wallow in war, extermination, greed and plunder, which are exalted by the descendants of those who came and decimated America.
Loosely based on the graphic novel «Perihan» by Turkish writer and director Cem Özüduru, this film is the hallucinatory journey of four children, victims of "The Corporation" during an epidemic (the film was made in 2019), who help each other with the healthy senses that they have and that the others lack: one who does not have a nose, another without ears, one who has no eyes and the only girl in the group who has no mouth called Perihan or Peri, which means Fairy. Through this character, there is also an ingenious and creative way to show a proactive, upright, shrewd, intelligent, and creative pre-adolescent woman, without resorting to political correctness or gender discourse, although one of the three children sometimes gets a little out of hand when interacting with her...
Without excessive special effects and remarkable art direction (sets, decors, and props), «Peri: The Girl with No Mouth» tells a story of the Apocalypse of our days, lived all over the world, in which the group flees from three soldiers who want to seize the girl. It is a journey full of surprises and it is a learning process, in which the children are forced to defend their lives in the same violent way that they try to exterminate them.
«Peri» and the French independent film «Travels Inside Foreign Heads» --a vibrant science-fiction drama by Antonio Amaral-- are two of my best film experiences of 2022 so far. Both are outstanding samples of fantasy cinema, with social content and renovating ideology.
