mirador (w&d antón terni, w. patricia olveira)

Antón Terni’s film is a slender, beautiful thing. It is an intimate study of three blind people who spend time together in the Uruguayan countryside. Terni’s camera is a silent observer, as the three play cards or go swimming in the ocean or even, on one occasion, get lost. This sequence when Oscar, searching for firewood for the barbecue, loses his stick and then his way, is heart stopping. Whilst the film is on the whole an affecting and life affirming study, this moment opens the door to the viewer on the vulnerability of the blind. It also draws our attention to the presence of the filmmaker and there’s a paradox here because we know that in this moment Oscar will be ok, because someone sees what is happening to him, but in another, when he is not seen, disaster could strike. Terni seeks to keep himself out of the story, but it’s an impossible task. In some ways the luscious use of the camera as it drifts, in keeping with the slower rhythms of its subjects, would appear to be his way of acknowledging this. The filmmaker’s eye is distinctive, it is a counterpoint to all that his subjects cannot discern, or rather, that which they discern in another fashion, which the camera could never capture. 

belmonte (w&d federico veiroj)

That Belmonte’s curiously Francophone name sounds like something out of an Alexandre Dumas novel is alluded to only twice in the film. At one point, in what we come to realise is a vision, he grasps a musketeer’s sword, which never appears again. And at another he wields his paintbrush like a sword as he attacks the canvas, in a moment which is slyly abridged. These moments are part of the protagonist’s gradual transition into a kind of stylised madness, one which ruptures the film’s naturalism with a subterfuge which is almost, but not quite, bewildering. 

Belmonte is an expressionist painter, whose work is reminiscent of Kirchner and Gil. His paintings suggest a mind which exists on the edge of distortion. At one point his daughter asks why he always paints men naked. There’s a clear implication that Belmonte, who seems comfortably troubled, would like to get to grips with his inner self, although his life is too normal (Montevidean?) to allow him to do so. Recently separated from the mother of his child, and coming to terms with a friend’s suicide, he becomes increasingly erratic, until finally he becomes afflicted by low-key visions that betray the extent to which he has become unhinged. 

The film questions the scope of the artist to be different, or mad, within the context of conventional society. Belmonte is a dad who has to pick his child up from school, and one who wants to have a good relationship with his nearest and dearest. At the same time, he reserves the right to cling to the deviance which fuels his art. It’s a delicate tension, which the film negotiates with some wit. There are no fireworks, everything is understated, even madness, but there’s the feel of a steady hand at the tiller, aided by some exceptional camerawork, steering the tale into ever more choppy waters. The film depicts a convincing Montevideo, a city which appears at the edges of the frame, the camera never revealing more than it needs to. Belmonte might drive a hipster car, but we never see it in its entirety, just as we never get to see more than glimpses of his pictures. Even the eponymous title hints at things we don’t know and never will, but this is always beguiling, rather than frustrating; the film succeeds in pulling off its delicate mission with some élan. 

la doleur (w&d emmanuel finkiel, w. marguerite duras)

La Doleur is a curious film. A big budget, glossy production, which is at the same time a literary mediation on the French experience of the second world war. The film is an adaptation of an autobiographical Marguerite Duras memoir, which describes her desperate wait for news of her husband, Robert, who has been captured by the Nazis. The first half of the film details a relationship with a French agent of the Gestapo, who claims to have information about Jean, but whose ulterior motive would appear to be his attraction for Duras. He invites her out for lunches at Nazi restaurants, as their relationship becomes more and more torturous and perverse. The agent, played with a dogged, lumpen charm by Benoît Magimel, is a curious figure, a compromised representative of a compromised France. This is when it feels as though Finkiel’s film is at its strongest, as it probes the divisions within French society which the war threw up. Those who threw their hand it with the invaders and those who resisted. Britain never had to face up to any latent fascism that may have underpinned society (the film made me think of the passage in Maclaren Ross’ Of Love and Hunger when he discusses the burghers of a South Coast town praising Hitler in the lead-up to the war), so the British war narrative has always been a less complex, more heroic one. La Douleur succeeds in capturing the stark duality of facing fascism: you’re either for it or against, there’s no middle ground. 

The second half of the film takes place following the war’s end, as Duras waits for news of Robert, who it emerges has been sent to a concentration camp. Here, the focus is on Duras’ emotional struggle to cope with the possibility of hope and the reality of loss. This provokes some grandstand acting on the part of Mélanie Thierry, although it feels as though the dramatic tension slips somewhat once Magimel’s character vanishes from the narrative. La Doleur has a stately feel. It’s the other side of the French coin. There’s no intellectual playfulness, rather a grand, emotional bagatelle, which seeks to pull off the trick of offering a cinematic depiction of a great writer’s inner thoughts. There are moments in its two hour duration when it feels as though the film is straining for effect, but there are others when it completely nails Duras’ inner turmoil and the cruel realities of living in wartime France. 

el motoarrebatador (w&d agustín toscano)

Toscano’s film, with a title that perhaps is a nod to Bicycle Thieves, is set on the outskirts of Tucuman, in Northern Argentina. This is a city where the police are on strike, and where gangs of bored men loot electrical shops in broad daylight.  A petty thief who robs old ladies on his motorbike is caught up in this listless world of borderline poverty, where people seek out any way possible to get hold of the desirable gimmicks of modern life. When one of his victims ends up in hospital, he starts to get pangs of conscience, and an odd-couple movie ensues, as the thief and his victim develop a mutual dependency on one another.

Whilst the world feels slightly Latin American generic, the narrative has just sufficient twists and turns to keep the viewer guessing and cover up a few holes. The good guys aren’t all they seem and neither are the bad guys. But what distinguishes Toscano’s film is its cinematic aplomb. The acting is impeccable, with Sergio Prina making for a credible, sympathetic petty criminal, whose complex desire to create a different kind of life for himself and his young son is portrayed with a deadpan assurance. The cinematography of Arauco Hernández contains an edgy dynamism, which excels in the looting scene, captured in one long take with a great pay-off. The soundtrack is punchy and effective. Everything possible is done to give the film an edge, one that helps it to steer clear of the Latin clichés, and makes for a solid, engaging piece of film-making. 

la noche de 12 anos (w&d álvaro brechner)

Brechner’s film tells the tale of three political prisoners in the Uruguayan dictatorship. (One of whom subsequently went on to become a celebrated president.) What gives the film its strength is that, save for a few flashback scenes, you’d barely know it. This isn’t so much a film about the dictatorship as a film about the capacity of the human mind to survive, in spite of everything. Astutely, the director, who also wrote the screenplay, sidesteps the impulse to explain or clarify why the three men whose story the film tells, are in prison. Instead it focuses, particularly in the first half, on the sensory experience, something that cinema, more than any other art form, is capable of conveying. The audience enters the labyrinth with the three prisoners and, as far as is possible when compressing twelve years into two hours, experiences their captivity with them.

The title hints at Steve McQueen’s Oscar winner, but far more than that, La Noche de 12 Anos is reminiscent of Hunger, McQueen’s first film. In addition to its cinematic artistry, and in contrast with other dramas about Latin American dictatorships, Brechner does his utmost to eschew sentimentality. Each character is allotted a certain leeway to explore their past and their personal lives, but this is never permitted to distract from the essence of the physical ordeal the men experience. Furthermore, it’s a necessary part of detailing prison life, which is not only that which the prisoner has to endure, but also that which he is deprived of. The love of family, companionship, seeing your children grow up. The acting, in particular the remarkable Alfonso Tort as Huidobro, exercises a similar restraint. These are three nuanced portraits of resilient humanity, in spite of the fact that these are characters who are barely allowed to speak and who have minimal interaction with anyone else. 

The result of the director’s restraint is a film of slow-building power. To watch this film in a full house in Montevideo is, inevitably, an emotional experience, one that illustrates the capacity that art offers to re-live and also to re-think the past of a given society. One would refrain from using the word ‘cathartic’: for some watching this film will be a bitter reminder of time and friends lost. As the audience drifted out I spoke to one veteran actor, a man a long way from the mainstream, who stood and watched the credits roll to the end, clearly deeply moved. However, this is a film which sets out to articulate the anguish of political prisoners on more than just a localised level, meaning that it triggers thoughts about those still held in Guantanamo, or living in limbo in refugee camps. For the film’s three subjects, there was, after twelve years, what might almost be called a happy ending, but again it is to the film’s credit that it does little more than hint at this. The film succeeds because it articulates the universal in the local; because in describing the three men’s ordeal with such vivid, cinematic precision, it compels an audience to confront inhuman political realities which continue to exist and which should never be allowed to occur in any decent civil society, (a concept that is increasingly under threat as ghosts of dictatorships past return to haunt us).

nosotros las piedras (we the stones) (d. álvaro torres crespo)

Crespo’s doc is a relatively brief, immersive journey into the lives of gold-panners living a destitute life in the jungles of Costa Rica. Exiled out of the national park where they formerly looked for gold, they get by on tiny fragments of gold dust. The quantities they manage to extract from the rivers are minimal. The panners, as a result, live a life of abejct poverty, clinging to a dream which seems completely illusory - a kind of fool’s gold. The narrative and visual style are determinably poetic, even whimsical. Over the course of a little less than an hour we glide through these marginalised people’s lives, the camera spying on them. There were times when it felt as though the film might have excavated these lives in more detail; all the same the film serves the purpose of classic documentary, taking the viewer into a world we will never know, revealing the harshness and cudged fortitude of people who exist beyond the mainframe of modernity. 

averno (w&d marcos loayza)

Obviously you want to like a film made in Bolivia that’s won a prize at BAFICI for best Latin American Film, that’s reached Montevideo, that sounds enticing. A reworking of the Theseus myth, set in the La Paz underworld. With larger-than-life characters, amazing locations, set against the backdrop of the Andes. If Averno does one thing, it affirms the photogenic possibilities of the Bolivian capital. Unfortunately, it doesn’t do much more, and ends up being a slightly tame, sub-Potter offering which isn’t nearly as bizarre as it perhaps likes to think it is. You can see Loayza’s intentions, to make a snappy, commercial film, something which is never easy to pull off. Perhaps it’s aimed at a younger demographic than mine, but Averno never lived up to its beguiling premise and I came out of the cinema feeling none the wiser about Bolivian society. Plenty of colour and an excess of Andino tropes, but a narrative that didn’t go anywhere left me longing for the Minatour to put Theseus out of his misery. 

los olvidados (d. agustín flores)

What is the function of cinema? What is it there for? On the one hand, it ties into a longing for escapism, for the dream, the notion that beyond the confines of this cruel world there’s another one, in which we are funnier or stronger or at least different. Chaplin and Fast and Furious and ET all fit into this category. On the other hand, it’s a mirror to the world. It shows us things that we know are there but cannot otherwise see. Apocalypse Now, Ken Loach, Sanjines, to name a few references. Any film postulates itself somewhere on this binary chart. Sometimes a film slots into both categories, sometimes it’s resolutely aimed at solely one. Documentary, almost inevitably tends towards the latter. Documentary cannot help but be trapped in realism. 

Los Olvidados fits firmly into this category. It depicts life in a Montevidean barrio, Marconi, which is by and large considered too dangerous for people to visit. It’s talked about as a no-go area, one even the police will only approach armed to the nines. Los Olvidados, its title a nod to Buñuel, takes the viewer there in the company of ‘Don Koni’, a rapper who is trying to convey with his music the realties of living in the barrio, for better or for worse. The film gives its characters cameras so that they can film inside the barrio. What emerges is a fractured portrait, of a place seeking to defend its dignity in the face of neglect from the authorities and media stigmatisation. It’s an honest, important, low key film. I may never go to Marconi, even though it’s just down the road from where I live. So long as the class dividing lines remain rigid, they are nigh-on impossible to cross. People become attached to their perceptions, narratives remain intractable. One of the only ways we can visit is via the medium of film. Flores’ film doesn’t seek to dress its characters up, there’s no hint of escapism or ghetto porn. It’s a window onto a world which is our world, those of us who live in this city, and beyond.