VLAFF 2011: Abel

Meet Abel (newcomer Christopher Ruíz Esparza). He’s nine years old, and when he just got out of an all-female mental institution. He is the subject of the Mexican film Abel, which recently screened at the Vancouver Latin American Film Festival. For the last two years, he has not spoken a word to anyone. His family’s living condition can best be described as marginal poverty. The father, as we discover, took off for the United States but no one has heard from him since Abel last spoke. Abel’s mother Cecilia (Karina Gidi) works menial odd jobs just to survive. His older sister Selene (Geraldine Alejandra) is a spoiled teenage brat who thinks that just because she had her quinceañera, she is permitted to date men ten years her senior. The younger brother (Esparza’s real-life brother Gerardo) is inquisitive and perhaps the only undamaged member of the family.

Abel’s mother brings him home. He stays up all night watching television and draws on his hand a lot. Eventually, he speaks, and since he has been mute for so long, everyone wonders what compelled him to verbalize again without stopping him. What’s truly shocking is that Abel has assumed the vacant role of his father: he critiques his older sister’s report card and refers to her as his daughter. He provides constructive criticism on his younger brother – now “son” – and his homework, with the promise of a trip to a water park for good behaviour and test scores. He expects to eat like an adult and is soon wearing sweater vests and ties at the breakfast table while reading the newspaper. It’s dastardly comic and the role gathers more and more Oedipal undertones and overtones. The doctor who has been responsible for Abel’s health recommends not disrupting Abel’s peace of mind by reminding him that he is a child and not his own father. The family eventually comes to accept this new status quo, as order has been restored and they co-exist harmoniously. And then one day, a man appears in the kitchen, claiming to be Abel’s father …

To put it colloquially, this could have been really, really icky material. Or as the young’uns might say, “ewwwwwwwwwwwwwww, gross!!! Your brother’s your father? How f***ed-up is that?” Very much so, reader, very much so. But there is so much more to Abel than the “ick factor”, and the director has a lot to express in this confident film.

The film’s director is the esteemed and much-sought after actor Diego Luna, famed for his breakthrough performance in Y Tu Mama Tambien and also appeared in Milk, Rudo y Cursi and The Terminal. Abel is an accomplished absurdist black comedy where ordinary lives are thrown into disarray, but re-arrange themselves into a new and unexpectedly harmonious whole. Despite the rather absurd premise and escalating comic hi-jinks that compel raucous and often uncomfortable laughter, a dark undercurrent courses this film and also in Abel’s veins. Abel thematically owes a great debt to Louis Malle’s 1971 Oedipal film classic Murmur of the Heart (Le Souffle au Coeur).

VLAFF 2011: También la lluvia

“Water is life, you don’t understand.”

So says Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri), the local indigenous community leader in the town of Cochabamba, Bolivia, in También la lluvia. His town’s water has just been privatized and even the local well purchased and maintained by a local indigenous group has been co-opted by a large water company based in California. The local laws seem to be complicit in this privatization scheme, as no one is permitted to own a private water reservoir and that it’s illegal to collect even the rain and turn into drinking water. (Although it’s curious that such a scheme for recycling rainwater is perfectly legal on the other side of the world, in Australia, and so many other cities have such green initiatives in place.)


A Mexican film crew has arrived to make a film about Columbus’s arrival in Bolivia, the missionary who opposed their draconian governance, and Hatuey, the legendary local hero who leads the revolt against the oppressive Spanish Conquistadors. Since Daniel is the unknown actor cast as Hatuey, the parallels between his role in the unnamed film-within-a-film and his fight to stop the privatization of water are unmistakable. The film is directed by artistic, slightly mad Sebastién (Gael Garcia Bernal), who casts the untrained Daniel and his charismatic daughter Belén in the film against a coterie of blowhard, self-satisfied actors, and produced by the pragmatic Costa (Luis Tosar), who is financially-minded and risk-averse but has an unexpected social awakening over the course of filming and the film. As the local political situation becomes more intense, so too does the filming, and it doesn’t seem like a complete accident that the film and the film-within-a-film have storylines running in parallel.

The film-within-a-film structure is not new, but here it takes on an added level of superficiality that contrasts the hostile political situation surrounding the filmmaking. The film opens with a helicopter carrying a large, stories-tall wooden crucifix over the city, much to the filmmakers’ delight. Cineastes will undoubtedly recognize this as a parallel to the opening of Fellini’s La Dolce Vita, with the helicopter flying over Rome carrying a giant statue of Jesus Christ. The difference is that although Fellini’s seminal film explores the vacuity of the characters, Bollaín’s film is full of urgent political purpose.


Director Icíar Bollaín makes her political film without any subtlety, and that adds to the ferocity of her work. Daniel makes an impassioned speech at a demonstrating asking, if they take away their water and can’t even gather the rain to survive, what more can they take: the sweat from their brows, or even their tears?

Bollaín deftly masters the art of contrasting both the Columbus film and the actual political struggle. The scenes with Columbus are majestic and vividly pulse with exceptional detail to time and place, even if the drama is overly scripted and contains some rather overripe dialogue from time to time. Yet she shows complete control over these epic crowd scenes, so much so that I had hoped to see the film-within-a-film released on its own as a separate project. The water war in the town has immediacy and captured by an always-vibrant camera, zoning into the action with an intense focus that lends the film a documentary film, as if we were following a news crew into the centre of the action.

VLAFF 2011: Post Mortem

It appears that the first two films I have seen at this year’s Vancouver Latin American Film Festival are both about neighbours. This, I assure you, was not planned, but for purposes of thematic continuity seems to have been a happy accident.

Following the stunning El hombre de al lado, my second film at VLAFF is Chilean director Pablo Larraín’s stunning, sobering Post Mortem. While the world prepares to recall the tenth anniversary of September 11th, there is for Chileans an equally emotional and personally felt event that happened on 9/11 that coursed through the country’s veins and informs its political character to this very day. For the uninitiated, September 11, 1973 was the day that the democratically elected Marxist Chilean president Salvador Allende addressed his nation in an eloquent, optimistic radio broadcast, just as his government was in the throes of a coup by notorious dictator Augusto Pinochet. Later that day, Allende committed suicide with an AK-47 rifle given to him by political ally and personal friend Fidel Castro. There are still reports to this day that he was actually assassinated and that the official cause of death was doctored, in both terms of the word, by the new government in charge.

Our entry point into Post Mortem is Mario (played by mercurial actor Alfredo Castro). He is 55 years old and lives in Santiago at the time of the coup. Mario identifies himself as a funcionada, or civil servant. What he really does is record medical findings on autopsies for the government in a morgue. He’s one of those unassuming, laconic types who wears a current haircut but for which he is about 20 years too old to pull it off. His loneliness is abated when he falls in quick, passionate love with his neighbour, the magnetic burlesque performer Nancy (Antonia Zegers) who lives across the street from him. Her family is a well-known supporter of Allende. One day, a loud commotion occurs at the house across the street, but Mario doesn’t hear it. When he finally realizes something has happened, he steps into an empty street and sees that Nancy’s family home has been decimated and everyone, including Nancy, is gone. Was the family attacked for supporting Allende?

Meanwhile, Mario’s work becomes involved in office politics of a different stripe. He arrives to find dozens of armed guards roaming the hospital, questioning the doctors not just on their professional integrity and competency but also on their political affiliation. Trucks show up, each time bringing more and more dead bodies freshly scraped off the pavement in the aftermath of the violent coup. Mario is tasked with piling the corpses and trucking them down the anonymous, dimly-lit hallways on their way to be autopsied. One of those bodies is Salvador Allende. It is not enough to simply accept this as life carrying on, as Mario’s colleague grows slowly insane from grief and when she asks what has happened in their country that has reduced them to this state, she is met with pitiless silence.

VLAFF 2011: El hombre de al Lado

Opening this year’s Vancouver Latin American Film Festival is a nervy black comedy about two neighbours and a wall, the Sundance Jury Prize winner El hombre de al lado (The Man Next Door) is directed by the Argentine filmmaking team of Gastón Duprat and Mariano Cohn.

Leonardo (Rafael Spregelburd) is a highly successful architect and furniture designer, sort of a cross between Arthur Ericksen and Eames. His designs have been sold around the world and admirers remark on the astonishing prices he charges on a basic chaise lounge. He lives in the only house Le Corbusier ever designed for South America, in La Plata, Buenos Aires. His wife Ana is a yoga instructor who seems to natter about inconsequential matters that can only be characterized as first world problems. They have a daughter who spends most of her time in her room, with headphones on, practicing the same set of dance moves as if she were learning them to audition for Lady Gaga’s next tour. They have a housekeeper. The house is an architectural wonder, one that compels tourists to stop outside and photograph it at all hours of the day. Into this world enters the next door neighbour, a middle-aged cowboy type named Victor (Daniel Aráoz) who decides to open a giant hole on the dividing wall between their properties so that he can let natural light into that side of his house. Naturally, Leonardo is aghast by this latest development.

Leonardo huffs and puffs around Ana, lawyers, friends etc. about the window being intrusive, since it overlooks his house. It is a clear invasion of privacy. As with most egotistical intellectual types, his resolve crumbles around Victor, but he reverts to his passive-aggressive behaviour in any situation except in an actual confrontation. What, Victor asks, is the problem? He just wants to build a window. Victor sees through Leonardo’s veneer of constant busyness and lets the air out of the balloon of his ego a little at the time, thus irking the latter even more. He invests a lot of himself into this game of intimidation, but what’s really at heart here? (Warning: mild spoilers to follow!)

What the directors try to show is that Leonardo’s most meaningful relationship in this film is with Victor, the villain type who lives next door and does pretty much whatever he wants. Leonardo is perpetually annoyed by Ana’s whining about her clients and admonishes her every time she wants a “peck”. Her response is to tell him off for being a jerk. He tries to communicate with their daughter, but all she does is nod, smile slightly, and look away into the distance. Although the actress playing the daughter is credited, it is essentially a non-speaking part, as people talk at her but she never responds to anyone. The comedy is not about the antagonist next door, but a character study about Leonardo himself.

Cinematically Inclined: Vancouver Latin American Film Festival 2011

For film buffs in Vancouver, every season has at least one or two major film festivals. In the late summer, bridging the gap between the QueerFilm Fest and the major International Film Festival in late September is underrated but no less intriguing Vancouver Latin American Film Festival (VLAFF).

Originally started in 2003 as a vehicle to promote Latin American films, the festival crested the wave of popular Mexican films that gained a global audience at the turn of the millennium, most notably Y Tu Mama Tambien, El Crimen de Padre Amaro and Amores Perros, each of which earned Academy Awards nominations. With Pan’s Labyrinth becoming a major hit a few years later, the emergence of Gael García Bernal, Diego Luna and Guillermo del Toro on the global stage, and the surprise Oscar win of Argentina’s El Secreto en sus ojos, Latin American film has become a player in world cinema. VLAFF honours this and brings some of the major films of the era into Vancouver.

VLAFF has grown in awareness and stature each year, and has the support of a number of local and national corporate and government sponsors. This year, the list of presenting sponsors and partners include: the City of Vancouver; the BC Council for the Arts; the Province of BC; Scotiabank; the Hamber Foundation, Simon Fraser University (which is also screening a number of films at their many campuses this year); Corona; Smirnoff; Holiday Inn; and the LGBT publication Xtra. Each of the Consulate Generals of Brazil, El Salvador, Argentina, Chile and Venezuela will also take part, as will the tourist ministry of Mexico. A number of other films festivals will also sponsor the event, including the Queer Film Festival, Doxa Documentary Film Festival, Jewish Film Festival and the Al-Jazeera Documentary Channel. As a number of films may touch on human rights issues, Amnesty International have also been announced as a community partner.

VLAFF 2011 will take place from September 1 to September 11, 2011. Films will be played throughout Metro Vancouver, including the following theaters:

• Granville 7 Cinemas
• Pacific Cinematheque
• Roundhouse Community Centre
• SFU Harbour Centre (Downtown)
• SFU Woodward’s / Goldcorp Centre for the Arts
• SFU Burnaby Campus
• PS Production Services 

Please check VLAFF’s website to check on locations and show times. Take note that tickets are $10 per film, but gala presentation tickets will cost $15. As films will be shown unrated, in compliance with local and federal laws, you must purchase a one-time $2 membership in order to see the films. Online ticket purchases can be made here. 

For those wanting an intelligent, exciting alternative to the commercial fare now showing on too many multiplex screens near you, VLAFF is a welcome breath of fresh air. A number of films presented at this year’s festival are summarized after the jump.