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Audio Format: DD 2.0 Video Format: Widescreen 1.85:1 (Anamorphic) Languages: Spanish Subtitles: English Region Code: ALL Year Made: 2004 Running Time: 92
Colombian Film 'El Rey' Nominated to the Goya Awards and Considered for Oscar Awards Nomination, 2004
 The Colombian movie directed by Antiono Dorado "El Rey" has been nominated to the Goya Awards for Best Foreign Movie. Interestingly, the movie "El Rey" mixes biographical fact with the urban legend that members of the Peace Corps opened the market for Colombia's cocaine three decades ago. In the film, a Peace Corps worker named Harry works with El Rey to move cocaine to New York and other US cities. 'El Rey" is probably the only film among the 50 in the running for this year's foreign-language Oscar Academy Award that had its reels searched for cocaine as they left Bogota's El Dorado airport, en route to France, where the film was edited. "There's always suspicion if anything leaves Colombia,'' says the film's director, Antonio Dorado. "They figure there's got to be something inside."
El Rey tells the story of Pedro Rey, the mythical father of the Colombian cocaine trade. A riveting drama based on true events, the film tracks Rey??s evolution from opportunistic businessman to megalomaniacal drug lord. Recruiting a small-time crook as his supplier, a Peace Corps worker as his North American distributor, and a Marxist revolutionary as his chemist, Rey turns the modest Colombian coke trade into a multinational corporation. The King then sets about protecting his empire by adding a cop and a politician to his team, as well as the buying the loyalty of the local peasants. But in Rey??s world, loyalty is a one-way street, and when the King turns his back on any of his subjects, he??d better hope that one of them doesn??t put a bullet in it.
Luckily, none of the reels was damaged by prying hands. Still, the search had its built-in irony, considering that "El Rey" ("The King") is a fictionalized account of Jaime Caicedo, Colombia's largely unknown first cocaine drug lord, a violent but Robin Hood-type figure who rose to power during the 1970s in Cali, Colombia's third-largest city.
Dorado, a native of Cali, sees the film as Colombia's chance to tell its own version of the drug war's beginnings, decades before the country became the third-largest recipient of US military aid that it is today. Having police manhandling his reels wasn't the only hurdle Dorado had to overcome, however. Colombia initially nominated "Maria Full of Grace," a high-profile favorite among US critics, as its entry for the Oscar for Best Foreign Film. But the choice ran up against a little-known Academy of Motion Pictures Arts and Sciences rule: Foreign-language films must be made largely by people from the country doing the nominating. "Maria" was written and directed by Joshua Marston, a US native. Colombia's answer was to choose "El Rey."
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