Joel Super
Communications Officer, International Engagement, Communications and Protocol

Action movie fans may remember the scene in True Lies where Arnold Schwarzenegger rather improbably rescues his daughter from atop a Miami high-rise using a Harrier Jump Jet, which can hover like a helicopter. News junkies may recall seeing these astounding planes lift of from the decks of British aircraft carriers during Ted Koppel’s brief, but intense, Nightline coverage of the The Falklands War in 1982. But it has taken 25 years and the first fiction film about that war to emerge from Argentina, Iluminados Por El Fuego/Blessed by Fire (Tristán Bauer), to suggest the intense suffering and misery those planes helped cause, without ever showing one.

Blessed by Fire opened the first Latin American Film Festival in Urbana-Champaign, which was held at Boardman’s Art Theater February 23 through March 1. The film perfectly emphasizes the distance then, as well as now, between what many Latin Americans know about “El Norte” and what most North Americans know about our neighbors to the south.

In large part, closing that gap was what Angelina Cotler, Associate Director of the Center for Latin American and Caribbean Studies at University of Illinois, had in mind when she conceived the festival. Of her decision to produce the festival, Cotler says “We have a responsibility to the community to bring knowledge of Latin America to them. I wanted people to enjoy the films and to expose them to Latin American productions to show different realities: to demonstrate that Latin American is not homogenous.” The five film line-up included Blessed by Fire (Argentina, 2005); Sin Amparo/Hopeless (Columbia, 2005); Habana Blues (Cuba/Spain/France, 2005); Machuca (Chile, 2004), and Favela Rising (Brazil, 2005).

To arrive at the line-up, Cotler did extensive research and also called upon her brother, a film-maker and a juror in Lima’s Latin American Film Festival, for his advice. The films that made it into the festival at Boardman’s were culled from her screening of 20 films and slogging through the complex stew of distribution rights, costs, and technical screening considerations.

Distribution issues, for instance, partly explain the lack of a Mexican film in the line-up. Potential Mexican contenders for a spot were either out of the running because they had been co-produced with European companies and weren’t yet available for U.S. release, or the rights were held by distributors uninterested in showing the film in Urbana-Champaign. They underestimated the response their films might have gotten. The audience applauded at the close of Blessed by Fire, screenings were well attended, and Cotler even got notes thanking her for spearheading the festival.

The films screened at the festival vary dramatically in subject matter, setting, tone, and style. Yet, taken together, key issues recur. Among the most striking in a North/South comparison is the way in which the ordinary, not the extraordinary, is so often the subject matter in these Latin American films. Here are no studly secret agents; no epic battles pitting good against evil and heavily reliant upon special effects; no plethora of exotic locations. Story choices like those can only be made with access to epic budgets, the stars to recoup those costs, and films possessing world-wide distribution potential because their plots don’t depend heavily on language. But the festival films suggest that perhaps, apart from budget considerations, the cultures out of which they arise are rather more focused on the ordinary—through temperament, tradition, and necessity—than is typical in Hollywood.

Sin Amparo/Hopeless, for instance, draws heavily on the conventions of Latin American telenovelas, a format closely related to what North Americans would call soap operas. What could be more ordinary than this genre? The opening scenes cement the connection visually. Amparo, apparently a bored socialite, attends a party with her jowly husband Rodrigo, they leave early and fight in the car, there’s an accident, she dies. The socialite is stunning, her clothes and house lavish, the car a Mercedes. The twist is certainly genre-typical: Rodrigo suspects Amparo had a secret life with a lover and becomes obsessed with finding the lover and figuring out what the affair means about his late wife. But as the plot unfolds against the high and low of Bogota and Amparo’s lover and her husband stumble through their parallel grief together, the waiters, prostitutes, business executives, friends, family, nannies, and dog-walkers who populate the scenes sketch in wonderful, myriad ways day-to-day life in a contemporary Latin American city.

Though the film is wholly different in feel and focus, the characters and plot in Blessed by Fire trade effectively in the ordinary currency of life too. Esteban, sent off to the Malvinas war at 18, returned and built a solid middle class life as a journalist, husband, and father. But, as the film opens, Vargas, a fellow veteran and former comrade, has attempted suicide after a string of lousy jobs, a series of addictions, and a failed marriage. This, we learn, has been the fate of many returning Malvinas vets: not greeted as heroes, as they were led to believe, but largely ignored as the pawns in an ill-conceived war ending in ignominious defeat, more have killed themselves than died in the war. As Esteban spends time at Vargas’s bedside, he relives their war experience. Flashbacks of the sadistic officers, the deafening battles, the dripping foxholes, and the mangled, dead comrades in fields of mud fill the screen. Seared on his memory, these images illustrate the horrors an average Argentine soldier suffered during the war, even as the hospital scenes focus on the prosaic, the routine, the antiseptic daily life and death of a hospital.

Where Sin Amparo, true to its genre, emphasizes private emotions over the personal ramifications of politics, Machuca, like Blessed by Fire, puts a human face on the very real, daily effects of politics and its betrayals. Set in Chile during the turbulent last gasp of Salvador Allende’s presidency and ending with Augusto Pinochet’s coûp d’état in 1973, Andrés Wood’s fictionalized autobiography centers its plot on the friendship of two boys. Gonzalo, a bourgeois obviously of European ancestry, and Machuca, clearly of indigenous ancestry, become friends when Father McEnroe, the headmaster of St. Patrick’s School, tries an experiment in social engineering by giving scholarships to poor boys. Woods deftly encapsulates the searing leftist/rightist split in Chile’s national politics at the time in the shouting match that erupts at a parent’s meeting at St. Patrick’s. Scenes where Gonzalo helps his new friend sell flags at political protests, both leftist and rightist, amplify the split. Repeatedly, the plot turns on personal betrayals that seem ultimately to be rooted in the stifling class divisions of Chilean society. These divisions, in turn, find both their source and outlet in the politics of the period.
As Dr. Cotler observed, “If you grow up in Latin America, class consciousness is in the air you breathe.” This is abundantly clear in the three preceding films. Class consciousness isn’t an issue the film makers decide to explore or thematize, it is the inescapable context for any plot built around contemporary life.

In a subtly different way, class issues are central in the festival’s other two films, Favela Rising (Matt Mochary and Jeff Zimbalist) and Habana Blues (Benito Zambran). Favela Rising, a documentary by young North Americans, deals with favela (slum) residents José Júnior, a DJ, and former drug trafficker Anderson Sá and their response to the drug-riddled despair of their Rio de Janeiro neighborhood, called Vigário Geral.

Altogether different in tone and effect, Habana Blues is, on the surface, a fairly light-hearted, engaging fiction about Ruy and Tito, young Havana musicians trying to make it in a society weighed down by a terrible economy and an inefficient bureaucracy. But as basically everyone in Habana Blues is poor and, except for the drug-dealers, everyone in Favela Rising is nearly destitute, awareness of class disparity in these films gives way to a focus on people dealing with the conditions poverty imposes on them.

Habana Blues, was, for me, the least interesting or compelling of the festival’s films, but was reported to be outstandingly popular with the younger audiences. Director Zambran, a Spaniard who studied at Havana’s famed Cuban Film Institute (ICAIC), is quite clearly making an homage to Cuba and the resiliency of Cubans. The resulting photography is lovely, but the story and characters are pretty thin. Spanish producers Martha and Lorenzo, who’ve come to Cuba looking for fresh acts, provide the narrative rationale for including scenes with high-energy rock, punk, funk, and rap bands and this gives plenty of life to many scenes. But the “be true to your art or sell out to the capitalists” plot device is hackneyed. It rings especially hollow when expressed by Ruy, who cheerfully cheats on his wife (who’s had to give up her dream of an education to support their children), accepts a divorce, and agrees to help her emigrate by nocturnal boat to Miami with their children. Good looks, good humor, and charm, his major characteristics throughout the film, don’t support the impassioned speeches about principle at the conclusion.

Favela Rising is rougher, less polished, and altogether more satisfying on many levels. It chronicles Anderson Sá’s work with the AfroReggae movement and its community organizing around favela culture. Scenes of his band performing and his work with favela kids delineate an incredible, visionary response to the death, destruction, and police brutality of daily life in a community held hostage by drug lords. In this context, the astounding dance/acrobatics and terrific drumming on improvised instruments makes for a compelling short film. At a mere 80 minutes, the film packs enormous punch and conveys a far more believable portrait of principle.

War, suicide, grief, betrayal, poverty, class warfare. Why would anyone, after a hard day at work, want to subject himself/herself to films where these issues are central? Bridging the hemispherical culture divide, personal education, widening one’s horizons—any of these arguments can work if you need to convince yourself to see original, interesting, compelling films. But the best reason to see them is that, overall, they’re splendid.

All films are now available on DVD.