The long way to you...
....It took me 3 days and 3 nights,
long as a gipsy marriage,
to get to Cartagena de Las Indias.
On which shore of which ocean, already?
On the other side of you, my love...
Too far away, my love,
in the center of the northeastern Caribbean coast of Colombia....
That festival breaths relaxation and easy going-ness to the max.
No glitz, no glam,
No glitz, no glam,
no paillettes or decolletes.
..But it breaths mainly at the secretive hours of the night,
as during day time,
temperatures,
temperatures,
dubbed by humidity,
prohibit all walking humans
to shadowy alcoves...
to shadowy alcoves...
Film company was rich and vibrant,
in this rich and vibrant place.
in this rich and vibrant place.
Evenings, nights spent walking for hours over grindy barrios,
postponed stories from a film to another
postponed stories from a film to another
...and then through personal tellings,
...minutes that felt like hours that felt like centuries
...with just a few words and feet
...hanging over the cement centuries old "jetee"..
...minutes that felt like hours that felt like centuries
...with just a few words and feet
...hanging over the cement centuries old "jetee"..
... over a quiete and pregnant ocean...
...mornings of joyous surf,
noons of fruity chroniques,
afternoons of groovy napping...
Cartagena, my Love!
The film that best responded to my documentaristic vocation was one that
for very personal matters
I had missed at the Berlinale 2015:
the Guatemalan opera prima Ixcanul, by director Jayro Bustamante.
A soothingly slow, sensitive film
about a 17-year-old Mayan coffee plantation worker named Maria and her family
living on the verge of a quietly rumbling volcano,
while trying to survive
in a culture and community
that is rapidly becoming at odds
with the modern world.
The opening shot is on Maria and her sad-eyed, impassive face.
She is to be married to Ignancio,
boss of the coffee plantation owner.
But Maria’s erotic desires lie elsewhere.
...isn't it always the case?...
His name is Pepe, a young coffee plantation worker,
who longs to escape to the United States.
He succeeds in doing so,
but not before impregnating Maria,
an act with consequences
that hang heavy on Maria
and her superstitious mother and father.
Everything under the horizon of the vulcano that dominates the village,
like a suffocating,
yet protective border.
The progress, seen from here,
is a temptation,
but also a menace...
Right from the beginning,
Bustamante gives us a portrait of the daily routines
that compose these people’s lives.
Maria and her mother Juana haul a pig to mate with a boar...
...a task which succeeds after they force the two unfortunates with full bottles of rum...
...a pig’s throat is cut for sustenance...
...coffee beans are harvested...
...gods are prayed to on the side of a volcano, resembling a bare moonscape......
This gives the setting of the film an edge of the world feeling.
Lush colored landscapes in natural lighting, or scenes of rituals,
compound with the secretive eroticism of the film.
The result is an atmospheric image of the contradictions
arising when tradition and desire
come into conflict.
Bustmamante told me he grew up very close to the Mayans.
Before filming,
he returned to the community
to hear their stories,
and he used it to build the script.
Sensitive to the sense of time and rhythm
of a world wholly different from ours,
Bustamante lets scenes unfold
at a peaceful pace.
The camera lingers over details,
such as mother and daughter bathing naked together
in a sauna-like steam room...
Only after a tragic snakebite that moves the location to a nearby city,
this wonderfully calculated camera work
is transformed into the jumpiness
and spontaneity
of the hand-held shot street documentaries.
Bustamante is careful not to Orientalize the characters,
to turn them into something strange for us ...
He is rather trying to live their lives in their own way,
shaken only by the dichotomy
between tradition and modernity ...
If Bustamante believed more in his directing and less in his story,
he could have concluded in a more original manner...
As it is, though,
Ixcanul is a film that shifts
from the slow cooking of immense visual and sensual pleasure,
to a forced marriage
with a plot
that lacks the force of the total...
But hey!...may be an author is born!
And this is not a small amount!
giulia dobre
