cadejo blanco. (w&d justin lerner)

Cadejo Blanco, the notes advise, is a local Guatemalan name for a mysterious beast. Towards the end of the film, the protagonist, Sarita finds herself alone in the jungle and hears a strange animal cry, which might be the Cadejo. On the other hand, the real malevolent beast is clearly the gangster who runs the local crew in the sleepy seaside town of Puerto Barrios. Sarita has come there looking for her sister who has gone missing from the home they share in a poor corner of Guatemala City. Before she leaves for the coast, she visits her rich boyfriend in the house he inhabits in the private gated community, indicative of the two tier world, reminiscent of Melchor’s Paradais. Things go much as one might expect when Sarita reaches the coast. From bad to worse. She survives on her wits, as the narrative makes her face one challenge after another. The film on the one hand does an effective job of getting under the skin of this marginal community, and on the other perhaps soft-soaps a tad, particularly with regard to the problem of sexual violence. One worries that, no matter how testing Sarita’s journey will be, what the director shows is just the tip of the iceberg of what really goes on. The film is held together by Karen Martinez’s fearsome performance, an actress exuding complete commitment to the role. In an interview, the director noted that he worked on the whole with local kids/ actors, but for the lead he recognised the need to cast a more experienced actress and Karen Martinez delivers with real verve. 

la jaula de oro (d. diego quemada-díez; w. quemada-díez; gibrán portela; lucia carreras)

A few years ago there was a film called Sin Nombre, which did very well for its director Cary Fukunaga. La Jaula is essentially the same film, following the path of three Guatemalan kids as they try to make their way across Mexico towards the promised land. The difference is that, whereas Sin Nombre offered a sentimental variation on the tale, La Jaula de Oro makes no bones about the cruelty and hardship involved in a journey which ultimately leads not to Los Angeles, as Juan, one of the trio hopes, but a desolate job in a snow-ridden corner of a troubled land. 

Guatemala and Mexico are perhaps even further away from Montevideo than Moscow, (say) might be from London. The barbarity revealed in the story feels as distant here as it would in London. There are those at the Montevideo Film Festival, where Jaula screened, who are perhaps sceptical of its vision of the downtrodden 3rd world being presented yet again for the voyeuristic delights of a 1st world audience. (It’s interesting quite how unpopular Ciudade de Dios is here, in spite of the involvement of Charlone). Nevertheless, Jaula possesses an undeniable integrity, refusing to let its audience off the hook. The three child actors whose journey we follow are as beguiling as we might expect, but their fates are not, and there’s no attempt made to sanitise the story.

In contrast to Sin Nombre, the film has a quasi-documentary feel, with the kids' fellow-travellers feeling like real people rather than extras. In addition Jaula mixes moments of great visual beauty with a roughness around the edges which ensures the viewer doesn’t become seduced by the picturesque nature of the journey across country. A paradox of the “immigrant road movie" (see also Winterbottom’s In This World) is that, in spite of the cinematic joys of witnessing landscapes and vistas we will probably never know, when telling the immigrant’s bleak story there’s little scope for the pleasures of aesthetics. Quemada-Díez treads this fine line with care. His movie might occupy familiar territory, but, as the gruelling last scenes emphasise, this is no fairground ride. Rather, it’s a film which seeks to take its place within the great abattoir of our tiny globe’s modernity.