pax in lucem (w&d emiliano mazza de luca, w. alejandro díaz lageard)

Pax in Lucem is an affectionate and informed documentary about the life of Torres Garcia, who was the great grandfather of the co-writer and narrator, Alejandro Diaz. As such it occupies what is now somewhat well trodden ground in Uruguayan documentary filmmaking: the investigation of the family heritage. However, the story of Torres Garcia is complex and perhaps not so very Uruguayan, as he left the country at the age of 16 and only returned when 60. In a sense his story is one of perpetual confrontation with ruin and failure, as the commercial ventures he embarked on in New York and Paris ended on the point of bankruptcy. As the film recounts, the return to Montevideo was almost a choice of last resort, even if he was subsequently venerated as a prodigal son on his homecoming. The film is constructed around the process of recreating a work, Pax in Lucem, that was destroyed when the Museo de Arte Moderno in Rio caught fire. Some 60 of the artists’ most important works were lost in the fire, and the director talks emotively about this loss, as he follows the process of trying to recreate the original artwork. As such the film morphs into a meditation on originality, and is all the stronger for this philosophical desvio. 

almas de la costa (w&d juan antonio borges, w. antonio de la fuente)

Almas de la Costa is apparently the first Uruguayan long form feature, even if the restored version only runs at around 45 minutes. The Sala Verdi is the perfect setting to watch the screening, accompanied by a pianist. Like the theatre itself, the film emerges from a moment when this relatively new country was finding its cultural feet, (some might say an ongoing process), as indeed was the medium of cinema. The acting has that theatrical feel that one finds in the silent films of Lillian Gish, the codes of which are well nigh impossible for a contemporary audience to grasp. Less than five years later Dreyer’s Joan of Arc would land like a dam-busting bomb, releasing a new wave of naturalistic emotion which is still being ridden, a century later. As such, one has to read between the lines to try and understand what the director and the film sought to communicate. The story revolves around the illness of Nela, who is afflicted with a malignant cough. Whilst this all seems very mundane today, at the time it would have been a clear reference to TB, and the audience would have grasped the fatal threat that Nela was confronting. Somehow or another, a supposed shipwrecked sailor is washed up on the shore of Nela’s fishing village (he is actually the heir to his wealthy mother’s fortune). Social mobility was no easier back in the day, but this stroke of fortune will change Nela’s life, as the two fall in love, enabling her to move away from the clearly documented poverty of the village. There is also a violent drunk character, whose macho impulses resonate with contemporary society, even if the film redeems him by having him undergo a benevolent transformation.

There’s nothing very radical about Almas de la Costa, (Souls from the Coast), nevertheless it is fascinating to map those ways in which a society doesn’t appear to change all that much over the course of a century, with so many recognisable traits embedded in the restored reels. Perhaps that lack of radicality also speaks of Uruguayan culture, the land that Lautréamont left behind, one that looks warily at the mavericks and the codebreakers. 

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. 

el otro tom (w&d rodrigo plá & laura santullo)

The title of the film is derived from the eponymous protagonist’s dual personality. Tom is a nine year old with ADHD. His Mexican mum, Elena, is raising him on her own in a small town in the USA, where she has to work long hours in order to pay the bills. Tom is an impossible child. Restless, destructive, getting into fights at school. Elena, at her wits’ end, seeks medical help and Tom is given a whole array of pills to control his behaviour. But the pills seem, if anything, to be counter productive. Tom doesn’t get any better, he actually gets worse and ends up making a suicide attempt. Elena is informed by a kindly neighbour that this is a possible side effect of the medication Tom is taking. Together, she and Tom decide to stop him taking the pills, but when this gets out to the school, she is told that this is abusive behaviour and could lead to Tom being taken out of her custody.

The film ends with a trip to Mexico, as Elena comes to the conclusion that what her son needs, more than anything else, is a reunion with his father, the kindly but feckless Julian, and his patria. As this narrative development unfolds, we realise that the Other Tom also refers to the bipolar experience of being a Latino/a in the USA. Tom seems like another person in Mexico, as indeed does his mother. The film concludes with a dreamy, hypnotic shot as Elena’s cares seem to be literally washed away. Tom’s ADHD, which never quite takes centre stage, ends up feeling like a metaphor for the immigrant experience. Switching constantly between Spanish and English and highly reminiscent of Samuel Kishi’s Los Lobos, El Otro Tom is one of those films that speak to the little known other in the USA, the barely visible Latino diaspora. 

el empleado y el patron. (w&d manolo nieto)

Manolo Nieto uses similar tropes to his previous film, El Lugar del Hijo, pushing a neo-realist use of location and event. The film concludes with a Raid, a rural horse race on the Uruguay Brazil border, in which Carlos, the empleado of the title, participates. This geographical zone is also one where El Lugar del Hijo was set, and Arauco Hernandez Holz’s vivid cinematography is another echo. Against this backdrop, the film tackles issues of class and land. Carlos, the empleado, is drafted in by Rodrigo when there is a labour shortage. He’s the son of a man who worked for Rodrigo’s father. Both these families have their own relationship with the land, and both inhabit it in a different fashion. One of the most striking scenes is when Carlos’ family appear on horseback whilst he is driving a tractor. They loom up on the horizon like something out of a John Ford film. Carlos’ family belongs to the Wild West, with its gaucho values, whereas Rodrigo’s capitalist family have adopted a life of easy luxury, selling soy to Europe. Rodrigo buys off the cops when he’s busted with marijuana on the wrong side of the border and he has even been converted to vegetarianism by his pretty, brittle wife, Federica. This contrast leads to inevitable conflict, even if it’s a conflict both men seem reluctant to embrace, wary warriors unwilling to lay their cards on the table. This reluctance makes for a slow burner of a movie, one which simmers and never quite comes to the boil. There is even the sense the denouement, where Carlos participates in the raid, perhaps seeks to overcompensate, as the sequence extends itself towards a dramatic resolution that feels telegraphed. Nevertheless, El Empleado y el Patron is a movie which succeeds in representing the twin poles of a country still caught in a timewarp, where gaucho values are celebrated, but struggle to sustain their place in a globalised world. 

la azotea (fernanda trias)

Trias’ slight, early novel is another in the catalogue of women going crazy in the attic. See Repulsion by Polanski and Jane Eyre, among others. Quite why Clara, the narrator, has lost it to such a degree that she goes from having a job and living apart from her abusive father to moving in with him, doting on him and being abused by him, is never entirely clear. The writing is sparse with a growing sense of inevitable dread as the fate of the childlike narrator and her little world hurtles slowly towards impending doom.

irse yendo (leonor courtoisie)

Leonor Courtoisie’s novel a clef is part memoir, part novel. One might attribute the influence of Sergio Blanco and the whole school of auto-ficción, but this form of writing, the novel as journal, has been around forever. Hamsun, Rilke, Rousseau, to name just a few that my ignorance permits.

The style of the novel is wilfully anti-narrative. It threads together impressions and memories from the writer’s time watching her barrio transformed by development, a process that she is sure will soon claim her old family home and the memories contained within it. As such the novel is a homage to the dysfunctional family, a strident thematic in Uruguayan culture and one that links her with the subject matter of the play she quits, directed by a celebrated local director whose methods are put under the microscope.

There’s a certain courage to this latter strand, a readiness to take on the sacred cows of the writer’s culture in a self-enclosed society where honesty is not always the wisest policy. Irse Yendo floats between these poles of family, theatre and development, teasing out connections, flirting with self-indulgence, seeking to both provoke and retreat at the same time.

There’s something downbeat at play, which is reflective of the condition of inhabiting a city where the ceiling is always going to be low, and the head is bound to hurt when its aspirations bump up against that ceiling. Just as there is no way to stop the barrio being gradually submitted to the will of the developers, who tear down history to replace it with uniform blocks of flats, the challenge is to find a way to retain a sense of wonder and hope, in spite of everything that provokes the opposite emotions. As such Courtoisie’s novel captures almost too acutely the ennui of growing into your twenties on the edges of the western world. 

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NB. As an immigrant citizen of this city, the novel’s insularity left me feeling uneasy. In a more cosmopolitan city, the presence of local social codes is far easier to negotiate. One is but one of many hundreds of thousands who are seeking to learn how to belong, how to adapt to this geography, with its architecture of place and memory. In a city where the immigrant is a stranger beast, the reminders that one comes from over yonder are perhaps more pressing. Irse Yendo is a book that describes a society that is slowly being hollowed out, but in capturing that society, the writer also helped to locate how distant the contemporary immigrant’s existence will always be from truly belonging to this world, even as this world itself is being lost. 

directamente para video [straight to video] - (d. emilio silva torres)

I was informed about the existence of this film by a Welshman I had never met before in a zoom conversation. He told me about the existence of a cult Uruguayan film, about a cult Uruguayan film, neither of which I had ever heard of. Nor had I heard of their directors. The Uruguayan cinema world is inordinately small. It’s very hard not to know or at least be the gym buddy of most people working in the medium, and if you don’t know an individual personally, then you’re sure as hell going to know someone who has fought or slept with or drunk with them. It’s a tight circle, so when the Welshman told me about this film, it sounded apocryphal. However, I did a bit of investigation and discovered the film did indeed exist and an actor I know, Alfonso Tort, was apparently in the movie. Then, in an even more unlikely turn, I was told by an acquaintance who learned I was going to the Sitges film festival that the director was going to be going there too and that he had been sitting at the table with her in a rundown bar on San Jose when our paths had last crossed, a month or so previously.

So I sought this director out and we drank a coffee under the Mediterranean sky and he told me about his movie and said that it would soon be released in Montevideo and we should meet up again there. I returned to Montevideo and his film opened and I went to see it. The film is a wonderful box of tricks, part documentary, part fiction, part Borges fable. It tells the story of a mysterious director who lived in Ciudad Vieja, as do I, and made the cult film, Acto de Violencia en una Joven Periodista, in the 80s. There are clips of the film within the film, images of a Montevideo which doesn’t look so very different to the Montevideo of today, because nothing ever changes here, we are trapped in a clock that never reaches midnight. It is a land of melodramatic films and empty streets, enigmatic clues which lead nowhere, promising change that never materialises.

Directamente para Video captures all this beautifully. It captures, above and beyond the mystery of the film and its absent director, the way that Montevideo is a puzzle which doesn’t want to be solved, in a way that no film I have ever seen has quite managed to do. Most want to capture empty streets and melodrama. But there was no sign of the director. He has vanished into the night. The man sitting at the bar with the producers, who I know, because in the world of Montevideo film, everyone knows everyone, was not the same person, I am sure, as the one I met in Sitges. The director of a film about an absent director has now gone absent himself. Perhaps he has fled to a Borgesian Patagonia, or a Bolaño-esque Catalunya. Perhaps in thirty years someone will be making a film about him, and, should I still be alive, they will come to interview me about that fleeting meeting in Sitges, when the world was still up for grabs.

porque todas las quiero cantar (d. florencia núñez)

If you’re a fan of Florencia Núñez there’s plenty to enjoy here. The singer returns to her roots in Rocha, and meets the songwriters who created the emblematic songs of the preposterously beautiful ocean departamento. She goes for lengthy strolls with them and then sings cover versions of their tunes, with full band, in a studio. There are half a dozen songs to match half a dozen interviews. It feels slightly formulaic, and the best moments for my money, are when the film manages to break through the formula, when the composers/ performers get to sing their own songs, once in an open air theatre, and most engagingly in a late night bar. That scene captures the essence of live music, a shared rite, whose participation breaks through barriers and unites. Whilst the rest of the film has a clear documentary value, capturing the thoughts and memories of these figures, giants in their community although barely known beyond, (even within the tiny music world of Uruguay), for my money it felt as though there might have been more magic to be conjured if the film had been prepared to be bolder in its vision of what the music truly means to Rocha. 

la tregua (w. mario benedetti)

Benedetti is venerated as one of the finest Uruguayan writers. He used to drink coffee in Cafe Brasileiro, one block away from where I live. At one table would be Galeano scribbling away, in another Benedetti. Many years ago I read some of his short stories and enjoyed them. Therefore La Tregua, his most famous novel, came as something of a shock, in terms of its banality, its petty sexist viewpoint, its dogged one-dimensionality. The novel is presented as a diary, kept by the narrator, Martín Santomé, as he approaches retirement, aged 50. The narrator’s wife died many years ago, he has patchy relationships with his three children, and he’s scared of growing old. Then he falls in love and begins an affair with Laura Avellaneda, a winsome underling in the office. She’s half his age, and at first he comments that he doesn’t find her terribly attractive, but gradually love finds a way and Santomé starts to dream of a contented retirement, pottering around going for coffee and the cinema, with Laura by his side. The only thing that disturbs this reverie is the occasional bout of jealousy brought on by Santomé’s awareness of the age gap, and the news the his youngest son is gay, something that fills him with disgust. One searches for moments when the voice of the narrator and the voice of the author might diverge, suggesting a sly commentary on the author’s part regarding his protagonist’s staid, questionable attitudes, but increasingly it feels as though this search is in vain. In the end it feels as though La Tregua merely captures the most mundane, grey uninspiring aspects of Uruguayan culture, a land of the prematurely aged, the quietly lascivious, the European rump ensconced in a strange unwieldy continent whose origins provoke little curiosity, whose blessings mostly revolve around coffee.

chico ventana también quisiera tener un submarino (w&d alex piperno)

Blend the longeurs of Uru-cine with a dash of Apitchatpong and a soupçon of Doctor Who and you end up with something like Chico Ventana. The tardis in this instance being a squat concrete construction which appears in the Philippines, disconcerting a small village. Meanwhile, Chico is a crewman on a cruise ship off the coast of Patagonia, and Elsa is leading a banal life in my friend’s flat in Montevideo. Somehow all these worlds are connected by a couple of portals (rather than portholes). Why they are connected, to what end, remains opaque. Although, as Snr Amato observed, there’s clearly a Globalisation/ Butterfly Effect subtext. The actions in the Philippine village will determine what happens to the cruise ship which in turn will cause a minor flood in my friend’s flat. Everything connects.

The film felt at its strongest when it observed with a certain acidity other parallel lives, those of the tourists aboard the cruise ship, urged to take a photo of a whale, or dance in the shadow of glaciers. At this point it felt as though there was a subtext to the subtext, something the Montevidean episode might have benefitted from. Likewise the portrayal of the Philippine village, with its gory superstitions, felt slightly done by numbers, for all the charm of the exotic. There’s something about Chico Ventana which gives it the feel of a greater story trying to break out of what ends up being a somewhat solipsistic one, even down to the closing images which justify the film’s extravagant title. 

The fact that large swathes of the film take place in my friend Chamorro’s old flat, where we sat and edited and even filmed once, added another level of parallelismo to a story seeking to emphasise the arbitrary connections that may exist in the world. Which also only helped to emphasise the way in which life in Montevideo constantly teeters on the brink of the surreal, a city where fact and fiction are always closer than you might think. 

cuentos de la selva {jungle tales} (horacio quiroga)

Quiroga is one of those writers who, if Disney ever get hold of him, will make a fortune for his descendants. His life was turbulent, so I have no idea if he has descendants. Perhaps, like him, they ended up lost in the jungle, struggling to get by. In which regard he would appear to be a quintessentially Latin American author, making him a highly atypical Uruguayan one. (Uruguay has its doubts regarding whether it’s part of Latin America or not.) The stories in this volume, which Claudia tells me all Uruguayan children grow up with, relate episodes from this jungle, and are just as exotic to a Montevidean as it would be to a Londoner. Stories of the flux and interaction between man and nature. Crocodiles that fight with warships, turtles which rescue explorers, giant rays which fight panthers to save a man who stopped people dynamiting the river. In this regard the stories are both elemental in their simplicity, and sophisticated in their complex understanding of the interdependence of mankind and the natural world. An understanding which was in short supply when Quiroga wrote, at the onset of the industrial age, and still in short supply today. 

 

el alma de gardel (levrero)

There’s something more awkward about commenting on the work of someone from your own country. The closer they are, the more you expect, perhaps. Many people I know love Levrero’s work dearly. He has been recommended to me many a time. I read a short collection of pieces he wrote over a year for the newspaper, and enjoyed it, but found it slightly underwhelming. The same could be said for this curious short novel, about a man who believes he has been visited by Gardel’s ghost. The man is a writer, who likes the rain and spends a lot of time in the National Library. He has an undeniably lecherous attitude to women, talking at length about how he likes finding himself in close confines with them on the bus. At which point you’re not quite sure as a reader how to place this character. Is he, as he initially seems, the writer’s alter-ego, or is he some slightly seedy older man? Perhaps the latter, but in that case, to what end? Why would a reader want to engage with him? And what does Gardel have to do with any of this? These were some of the questions that arose from reading the novel and I have to be honest and say they felt like slightly frustrating questions. Perhaps I chose the wrong novel, as I believe there are many, or perhaps, as a fellow Uruguayan, I am inclined to be overly critical. 

el inglés (martin bentancor)

There’s a school of literature in the Americas which might be described as stoic rural. Willa Cather, Jack London, Faulkner, Quiroga,  Juan Rulfo, Twain, even Marquez, perhaps. Of course there are variations on the school, but essentially these are novels about those who made a home for themselves on the edges of the new world, imbuing these new territories with mythical figures, slightly larger than life, gods of the new frontiers. El Inglés belongs to this category. Set over the course of a wake taking place over the course of a single night, as a mysterious friend of the deceased narrates a story to a handful of men about el Inglés, an Englishman called Collingwood who settled in an Uruguayan backwater. It’s a tale which is bigger on detail than it is on action, although it neatly succeeds in rounding up the story of the Englishman and the deceased into the same bundle, seen through the eyes of the schoolmaster, who is himself a stranger to these parts. Where Bentanor comes up trumps is in the way he succeeds in evoking the idea of a timeless world, unchanged and unchangeable. Furthermore, by framing the story against the backdrop of a single night, he captures the languorous rhythms of this rural backwater, where present, past and future seem to eddy in the same waters, washing up against each other in an inseparable dance. 

chacabuco (d roberto suárez)

Suárez is the maverick genio of the Rio Platense stage. Roberto Arlt meets David Lynch. HIs characters are oddballs, wackos, weirdos, but bizarrely loveable. They’re loveable because they all belong to the same family. Literally, in so far as all the characters in Chacabuco are related, metaphorically, in so far as they are all off the spectrum somewhere, and theatrically, in that Suárez takes several years to develop, rehearse and produce his shows, meaning his band of actors become as tight and incestuous as a family unit. Sometimes this kind of process might not pay off, but in Chacabuco it does so, spectacularly. The players interact like a finely honed machine, aware of every look, every nuance of their companions' behaviour. It’s a play where it’s just as compelling observing those who aren’t speaking as those who are. The word is shared around between the company, something to be usurped or exchanged or held on to sometimes, as a character makes a bid for the attention they believe they, as a character in this unlikely tale, deserve. However, above and beyond the word, the feature which defines Chacabuco is the quality of the silences. A silence speaks as much if not more than words. Silence is that moment of strange uncertainty on stage, as though the characters and the audience are given pause to think: where are we going? Are we on the right course or are we completely fucked? The spectators, like the characters, are never really sure. In fact we’re not even sure if we’re living in the present or some other, parallel Borgesian time. There are about fifteen endings to Chacabuco, which is normally not a good sign. But when you’ve worked on a play for several centuries, you can get away with it. The wonder is that each ending is an advance or improvement on the last one, until we finally get to the last delirious end, which blows the mind and then comes back to stroke the mind with a send-off full of strange tenderness.  

fraylandia (d sebastián mayayo, ramiro ozer ami)

Fraylandia is a classic documentary which adheres to a well-worn formula of following various characters in order to tell a complex story. The story is that of the Botnia plant built at Fray Bentos on the Uruguayan side of the River Uruguay, a plant which was claimed, on the Argentine side, to be contaminating the river. The dispute lead to the bridge spanning the two countries being shut for nearly five years. It was a low-key dispute in a low-key part of the world. The film follows life on both sides, focusing on various characters: a Uruguayan living on the Argentine side of the border, one of the protestors; another Uruguayan who’s a vigorous defender of the plant, a Finn who works there, and loves the life in South America, and finally a woman who had a relationship with a Czech worker who returned home but sends her baleful love letters, regardless of the fact she’s now seeing someone else. The pace and tone of the film are gentle as it seeks to maintain an even-handed, affectionate appraisal, which rather skirts the issue of any possible contamination and the potential effects on the environment. 

la fundición del tiempo (d juan alvarez)

Alvarez’s film is one of those which you begin to enjoy far more the moment you step out of the cinema. This is not a back-handed compliment. There is a code (codigo) to watching cinema, and when a film wilfully disrespects that code, as a viewer we feel disorientated, unsure of ourselves. However, the act of breaking the code, of fucking with time, is something that a bold filmmaker is prepared to do in order to assault and reform perception. There were times, watching La Fundición del Tiempo, when I struggled with the lassitude, but within seconds of leaving the cinema, stepping out into the actuality of Bartolome Mitre, I was basking in it. A curious paradox, but an admirable one.

The film is split into two halves. One is set in Japan. It studies a tree doctor who saved some trees which had been half-carbonised by the nuclear bomb at Nagasaki. The doctor continues to grow trees from the fruit of those atomic trees. The second half occurs in Uruguay. It focuses on a man who tames wild horses. The process is documented in painstaking detail. We learn little about the man, but everything about the process, the way in which man brings nature to heel, with a mixture of cruelty and kindness. Alvarez’ camera lingers, frets, rides with the tamed horse, as it buckles and resists before it ultimately capitulates to man’s will. 

The two halves are married by an extended, Reygadas-esque sequence of mist and white light. Images appear and fade away; a metaphor for the process of watching a film where the viewer’s engagement seems to drift in and out of focus. In that sense this is a profoundly meditational experience. Rather than seduce us with narrative and flow, the film challenges the viewer to reflect. The translated title of the film might be: The Casting of Time. Alvarez compels the viewer to question their relationship to time, as a viewer and as a human being. 

los últimos romanticos (w&d gabriel drak)

It would be tempting to use Los Ultimos Romanticos as a template for a less than perfect script development process. The film is essentially a buddie movie, constructed around the affable characters of Perro and Gordo (to Spanish readers those names alone perhaps suggest something slightly too easy), who get by selling marijuana plants in a small Rio de la Plata balneario. The off-season seaside village is deserted, as most of the residents are Europeans summer there in the European winter. However, one Hungarian couple have remained. Perro finds them dead in their bed. He also discovers a stash of four million euros in their home which he removes and hides with Gordo’s help. The title of the script refers to the fact that the two are in theory writing a film script, (although they seem to have no connection at all to the film business in any shape or form), hence the maverick cop who will prove to be their nemesis ascribes the duo the titular nickname. A couple of bohemians living their lives free from the system. The problems with the film are thus: firstly, neither character seems in any way ‘romantic’ (in the poetic sense of the word). Secondly, the discovery of the money should be a Maguffin, rather than the driver of the plot. Thirdly, the twists feel predictable. Fourthly, there’s no tension at all. In the end, Los Ultimos Romanticos falls into that dangerous comedy-caper territory which is so hard to pull off. For undisclosed reasons, filmmakers all over the world choose possibly the hardest genre of them all to carry off with recurring frequency. The bonus is this allows the script to include jokes for the locals to enjoy. The downside is that it’s very hard not to make a pedestrian comedy-caper movie, especially when the caper element is as contrived as it is here. 

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 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).