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The foreign title of the film is the name of a Canary island – LA GOMERA. The English title THE WHISTLERS refers to the people that speak the land’s native tongue, a language totally formed out of whistling – a whistling language called El Silbo Gomera.
Crooked cop Cristi (Vlad Ivanov) learns to speak this language from his Spanish-speaking Mafioso ‘friends’ so that he can communicate with them without the knowledge of the cops who has every place under surveillance including Cristi’s home. The story unfolds in 8 chapters each one named after a character in the story. For such a serious theme on the Mafioso, director Corneliu Porumboiu is unafraid to inject his brand of humour. Porumboius’s film is full of similar surprises.
Besides the nod to Hitchcock’s PSYCHO shower scene, director Porumboiu brilliantly places a clip from John Ford’s THE SEARCHES that includes a scene where a whistle signal is made in a crucial moment. It is the attention to detail and the outrageous plot unfolding in absolutely dead seriousness with style and wit that makes Porumboiu’s film so deliciously wicked and entertaining.
Festival Reviews 