DIRECTOR: FRANCO LOLLI.Loosely translated both as "good people" and "rich people", Gente de bien is an absorbing and wellobserved debut feature, driven by a superbly naturalistic performance from Bryan Santamaria as an innocent young soul slowly waking up to social and economic injustice.
Eric (Santamaria) is a 10-year-old boy sent to live with his impoverished handyman father Gabriel (Carlos Fernando Pérez) in a grungy quarter of downtown Bogota. Gabriel’s well-heeled client, Maria Isabel (Alejandra Borrero), is a kindly matriarch who takes pity on both Eric and his father, inviting them to stay at her family's luxurious country villa over the Christmas holiday when they would otherwise face eviction. This introduces Eric to a new world of affluence. But good intentions do not always deliver as tensions soon begin to crackle between the rich owners and their poor guests, exposing the gap between the ideal of charity and the starker realities of the class structure.