Actor Moises Arias discusses the film "Monos"

Dec 17, 2019
Q&A with actor Moises Arias, moderated by Raj Roy, following a screening of Monos. Monos, Alejandro Landes's intensely thrilling twist on Lord of the Flies, won a Special Jury Award at Sundance in 2019—one critic called it “Apocalypse Now on shrooms.” Julianne Nicholson plays a terrorized American engineer held captive by teenage guerrilla bandits in an unnamed South American jungle. Leaderless and rootless, the child soldiers puff themselves up with names like Rambo, Smurf, and Bigfoot (the latter a brutal Moises Arias), and survive the tedium and predation of the wilderness through sexual games and cult-like rituals. As they wage physical and psychological warfare on perceived enemies—and, inevitably, among themselves—they are reduced to a state of desperate barbarism. The film's sense of surreal menace is amplified by Mica Levi's discordant soundscape and Jasper Wolf's cinematography.'