What was the last movie you saw from Uruguay? I was not sure I had ever even seen a film from that country until I recalled watching La Noche de 12 Anos (English title: A Twelve-Year Night) in 2018. Directed by Alvaro Brechner, it was the story of three political prisoners from the National Liberation Movement aka Tupamaros in Uruguay who were systematically tortured in jail during the military dictatorship of the country in 1973. The only other film I recall that was specific to Uruguay was Costa-Gavras’s State of Siege (1972), a Kafka-like drama based on the real-life kidnapping and assassination of Daniel A. Mitrione, a government official with the United States Agency for International Development. But Costa-Gavras’s film was actually shot in Chile, not in Montevideo where the events took place, and was primarily a French production so it doesn’t really qualify as a Uruguayan production…which brings me to Whisky, a 2004 film by Uruguay filmmakers Juan Pablo Rebella and Pablo Stoll. Whisky could not be more different than the politically charged A Twelve-Year Night and offers instead a subtle, bittersweet character study directed in the deadpan absurdist style of Aki Kaurismaki (Ariel, Le Havre) or similar kindred spirits like Roy Andersson (Songs from the Second Floor, About Endlessness) or Jim Jarmusch (Stranger Than Paradise, Dead Man).