Horrible, fascist and poorly acted

Fantastic!

In other words,this film is a surreal ride.

Each character in this movie — down to the smallest one — is an individual rather than a type, prone to spontaneous changes of mood and sometimes amusing outbursts of pettiness or ill humor.

"La vendedora de rosas" (the rose seller) is a story inspired by Hans-Christian Andersen's "The little match girl". I cried because of the end but is the harsh reality of a country where children in slums suffer the most. So, if based in Andersen's, the end is predictable, but very good adapted to Colombian reality and not exclusive from this country. Any child in any slum might have the same fate, but also faces that fate with imagination, and that's where the fairy tale gets in.This movie used natural actors, same as the "Slumdog millionaire", and I think Victor Gaviria used the fairy tale adaptation to make it more universal and more poetic. Once you leave the screen, you feel lucky you can pay a movie ticket, but also you believe you can do something better for your own children, and those children outside the theater begging for a meal.

La Vendedora de Rosas is a companion piece to Victor Gaviria's 1990 Rodrigo D:no futuro, about the lives of street boys from Medellin,Colombia. Vendedora focuses on girls equally affected by poverty, ignorance, abuse and neglect. It earns a place next to Mira Nair's Salaam Bombay and Hector Babenco's Pixote, excellent urban youth films in the tradition of Bunuel's Los Olvidados. Vendedora does not shy away from depicting the effects of drugs, violence, and family dysfunction while allowing for brief moments of tenderness and solidarity, even joy. Gaviria has enlisted street kids in enacting events from their daily lives, during 48 hours preceding Christmas. The film refuses to cheapen their plight with plot contrivances or stylistic flourishes. The spanish spoken is specific to the youth of Medellin, a welcome challenge to most native speakers. The fate of the characters evolves naturally from earlier scenes, without being predictable. I recommend La Vendedora de Rosas to anybody who considers film a window to the world of folks we wouldn't otherwise be able to access and an opportunity to understand it.

This is a movie that shows the life of a little girl who sells flowers in the streets of Medellin, Colombia. The violence, the drugs, the misery, are his partners every day.The movie is good, made with kids of the streets, there are no real actors here. The pain in the eyes of the kids is real.

A heart-breaking urban tale that makes optimal use of natural actors and improvisation, together with very basic photography,but doesn´t have any of the technical troubles of the director´s previous release, "Rodrigo D". It renders a very authentic look to city-living in Colombia, without misleading morals or boring social commentary. However, it´s lyricism sets it apart from any pretensions of "real" cinema.