Cocote is a Dominican revelation — a bold and unflinching portrayal of faith, mourning, and the unspoken violence that lingers between social classes and belief systems. Director Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias crafts a film that is both deeply rooted in Caribbean culture and radically experimental in form. The result is a work that resists easy categorization, blending ethnographic observation, religious ceremony, and fractured storytelling into something entirely singular.
| Movie Details | Cocote |
|---|---|
| Country | Dominican Republic |
| Year | 2017 |
| Genre | Drama, Spiritual Realism |
| Runtime | 106 min |
| Director | Nelson Carlo de los Santos Arias |
| Main Actors | Vicente Santos, Yuberbi de la Rosa, Judith Rodríguez Pérez |
At the heart of Cocote lies Alberto, a Protestant gardener who returns to his rural hometown after the death of his father. What unfolds is not a simple tale of grief but a confrontation between two cosmologies — the Protestant restraint of the protagonist and the syncretic Catholic rituals of his family and community. These contrasts, shot through with feverish energy and poetic fragmentation, evoke a world where faith is inseparable from identity, and belief becomes an arena of conflict as much as solace.
The film’s visual language is audacious: Arias moves between black and white and color, between handheld realism and stylized tableaux, often allowing the ritual itself to overtake the narrative. In doing so, Cocote becomes a meditation on how stories are told within a culture, and how cinema can both document and disturb those rituals.
This is not a film that seeks comfort or closure. It is restless, spiritual, and deeply political — reflecting the fractures of Dominican society through sound, rhythm, and repetition. The performances, especially Vicente Santos’ quiet intensity, ground the film’s abstraction in human emotion, turning Alberto’s silence into a haunting metaphor for displacement and repression.
Winner of the Best Latin American Film at the Locarno Film Festival, Cocote marked a defining moment for contemporary Dominican cinema. It challenges not only how the Caribbean is portrayed on screen but how we understand the intersection of spirituality, justice, and resistance in postcolonial contexts.
Arias doesn’t offer answers — he stages a ceremony of contradiction, where cinema itself becomes a form of ritual, mourning, and renewal.
