Our first day of film-going went off quite smoothly, beginning in Argentina with a hard look at how the print media can distort political events with significant ease, and finishing up in Spain with an excellent character-driven film which attempts to show whether decent human beings can emerge from a highly competitive and psychological corporate selection process. In all, our Saturday movie-going session lasted about nine hours and was full of interesting surprises including a wonderfully delightful Chilean film directed by Rodrigo Sepulveda with a wonderful performance by Chilean actor Jaime Vadell.
La Crisis Causo 2 Nuevas Muertes (The Crisis Caused Two New Deaths) was the June 27, 2002 Clarin newspaper headline which referred to the outcome of a violent barricade confrontation in Buenos Aires between Piqueteros and the police the day before. Two young activists, Maximiliano Kosteki and Dario Santillan, were murdered by the Argentinean police on that day but the newspaper Clarin, despite having possession of the incriminating photographs (and selectively publishing the ones that were ambiguous), distorted the events by claiming they did not have any information on who killed the piqueteros. The mainstream media followed Clarin's lead and distorted the events even further suggesting that a rival piquetero group was responsible. The film is a well- documented call for justice in the media, which is an important struggle in Latin American social movements. It is very common for the media in Latin America to play an active role in political confrontations, usually taking the side of law, order and stability and often blurring the repressive methods which are used to control popular opposition to neoliberal government policies. Very interesting. The film could have used a more concise "montaje" and a better narrative device; at times the information is overwhelming and the documentary tends to hit us over the head with its central thesis. A few technical flaws, especially in sound, but overall a great documentary and a good window into what has taken place recently on the other side of the Andes.The great thing about documentaries is that they take you places you've never been before even if you've been there before. This is the central idea of the Venezuelan documentary, Macadam, directed by Andres Agusti. This film shows us a harsh Venezuela through the eyes of a highway. In a car or on a bus, the highway is a vessel that takes you past a thousand stories and realities you will never see or hear. These stories, nevertheless, exist on the ground and on the side of a road where the fierce sound of cargo trucks and microbuses passing by at excessive speeds interrupts an otherwise tranquil landscape of human existence. This filmmaker brings us close to those whose faces we see blurred as we speed by indifferently on our way through. And so even though the highway which dissects a Latin American country is a place most of us have experienced, we nevertheless learn something new about the lives those faces represent. The lack of narration and the lack of momentum might bother some people, but I think the vehicle of the film, this sort of slow introduction to each of the characters and the obsessive attention to detail interrupted abruptly by a passing bus whose driver is blasting cumbia, reflects effectively this harsh contrast between the fast-moving economic highway (flanked by the ubiquitous oil pipeline) and the slow passage of time lived by real people on the ground.
The second half of the day was reserved for fiction. The Chilean film Padre Nuestro was a delightful surprise. It is the story of a dying man whose dying wish is to reunite his estranged family for one last group photo in Quinteros, a beach community in central Chile, but not before spending a night out on the town in Valparaiso with his younger son who helps him escape from the hospital where his prognostic is bleak. He is a man who has lost everything that is important to him, his wife and his three children, and although he doesn't regret anything he has done (to the disdain of his daughter, played by Amparo Noguera), he recognizes that the only thing that matters is his family, whom he loves despite his fatherly limitations.
Our first day culminated with an exceptional film called El Metodo, a Spanish film directed by the Argentinian Marcelo Pineyro. This film takes us into the dark world of the corporate selection process. The story unfolds almost entirely in a corporate boardroom where a handful of candidates for the position are forced to participate in a highly evolved psychological selection game breaking all the rules of decency and mutual respect in the process. As a mass anti-globalization protest goes on below in the streets of Madrid, in the high rises we find out just how ruthless people can become in order to succeed in the highly competitive corporate world. The film's script is really incredible, as are all of the performances. Although we only share a few hours with the characters, the fluid and cutting edge dialogue is very entertaining and revealing.
