Colombian Cinema: El Vuelco Del Cangrejo (Crab Trap) (2009)

Director – Oscar Ruiz Navia

The Pacific coast is a fascinating part of Colombia. Highways have not yet arrived to many parts of the area, and the only way to get to some towns is by boat or airplane. Being that many of the residents of the Pacific coast are poor black fisherman, they don’t get a lot of chances to get out, and it feels isolated, like Colombia’s own Deliverance-like south. I didn’t see more than a couple other gringo tourists while I was there, and even Colombians from other regions were not numerous.

La Barra is an isolated village in this neck of the woods where the movie takes place, a real town that is actually in the department of Valle de Cauca on the Pacific coast, close to Buenaventura and just south of Choco. There is a white guy called “Paisa” (Jaime Andres Castano) meaning he is from the region surrounding Medellin, who wants to build a hotel on the beach, mirroring the real-life situation of Paisas buying up cheap land in the town of La Villa to build surf hostels on the shore. Daniel (Rodrigo Velez) is a guy who comes from some hip urban enclave. He wants to find a motorboat out of the region so that he can continue his backpacking. Daniel has problems; he looks at a woman’s photo from time to time, but we are never quite sure what’s wrong with him. He is travelling on the cheap and stays with Cerebro (Brain, played by Arnobio Salazar Rivas), a local fisherman with money problems. There seems to be no fish in the waters nearby, so Brain has no cash, and all the motorboats are far away, leaving Daniel stranded. Daniel’s money is robbed, so he has to help Cerebro with things like cleaning debris on the beach to pay his room and board. The Paisa, meanwhile, disrupts the quiet village with loud speakers that blast reggaeton. The Paisa has the modern rights to the land, but the Afro-Colombians have lived here since the days when slaves escaped from their masters to hide in the jungle, and resent the interloper.

The movie moves sloooow. It plods lethargically with the same general rhythm of daily life in the region, capturing the way that people don’t seem to measure time in the same manner over there. Much like the Daniel in the film, I was looking for a boat from Bahia Solano to Buenaventura to continue on my journey when I was travelling through the region, and there were no schedules or guarantees that one would even arrive. Sometimes a boat came, sometimes it didn’t. I felt like a total uptight Gringo looking for some sort of timetable. The beaches and jungle are unspoiled as of now; the Paisa’s “development” in the film is not much more than some cabanas and a fence made of plywood to make a claim on the beach, which the Afro-Colombians have no trouble dismantling. The area gets less sunshine than the Caribbean coast, and of course paramilitaries and guerrillas lurking in the local jungles haven’t helped make tourism much of a burgeoning industry in that region. The film captures a sense of this part of Colombia as one of the last frontiers, still surrounded by thick, difficult rain forest and full of people eking out a living off the land. But modernity is coming, in the form of outsiders with disposable income for travel and investment. The film is uneasy about how these foreigners will change the culture and environment of the Pacific coast, even as the changes are pretty much inevitable.

Technically, Afro-Colombians in this part of Colombia have their rights protected by constitutional court decisions to be in control of their heritage, including the lands they have settled, to avoid exploitation by outsiders. However, many Afro-Colombians have subpar literacy, and are unaware of their rights, making them easy targets for narcos, palm oil and mining companies, and illegally armed groups seeking to drive them off their land. A constitutional provision that guarantees a land title to rural Afro-Colombian communities that have organized loosely as a group and occupied their property for 10 years or more does exist, but is often difficult to enforce. As the descendants of escaped slaves once again begin to feel the effects of oppression, will they run or defend what is rightfully theirs? It is the rhetorical question at the heart of this film, and it lingers uncomfortably afterwards without an answer.

Colombian Cinema: Los Actores del Conflicto (The Actors in the Conflict) (2008)

Director – Lisandro Duque

Two struggling Colombian actors (Mario Duarte and Vicente Luna) and an actress from Venezuela (Coraima Torres) finally find a possible sponsor for their work onstage. Their benefactor is heading to Spain, and asks the actor named Alvaro to keep some boxes full of books in his apartment as a favor while he travels to Spain. There is one box, covered in red masking tape, that is full of business of no concern to an actor, that he is never, ever supposed to open. Mario is cool with it; after all, this guy is his ticket out of poverty! He wasn’t planning on opening any of the boxes, why start trouble?

Then the actors then hear on the news that the man was detained in Spain for laundering money. The group begins opening the boxes, finding most of them filled with books. But the box with the red tape, well, that one is full of assault rifles. This is a conundrum; if the actors tell the authorities about the guns, the owners of the weapons might take revenge on the tattlers. They decide to try a different way out; they will use their skills in the dramatic arts to pretend to be guerrillas. They will bury the guns in a ditch in southern Colombia, and then tell the authorities that they want to “give themselves up” and tell where the weapons are. Using a priest well-known for communicating secretly with guerrillas in the same situation, they will have him ask the Office of the High Commission for Peace to grant them asylum in Spain, where they imagine they can actually make some money as actors.

The three go to a small town in the llanos (plains) region a few hours southwest of Bogota, where they make some money being mimes in the town square. Mario wears a fake moustache and pretends to be a guerrilla, speaking to a priest in a confessional booth to set the whole plot into motion, but with the strictest confidentiality. While in the llanos, however, they manage to get themselves entangled in the conflict for real, running into real guerrillas, paramilitaries, and the Colombian army. The men are both kidnapped. What started as a joke soon becomes all too real, and the men start to get second thoughts about using the armed conflict to get rich when so many are still suffering, especially those kidnapping victims languishing in FARC camps waiting for their release.

The film is an awkward dance around a heavy subject. The actors are sarcastic and practically nihilist about Colombia’s problems at the beginning, upset with their own insolvency and little else. The FARC camp scenes are quite lighthearted. There’s no killing, and no real brutality. The prisoners seem to be free to move around, even as some of them go insane. After giving a glowing revolutionary monologue from one of his own plays, FARC actually lets Duarte go free, a little too convenient to the plot for my tastes. The paramilitaries seem only slightly more threatening, but everyone seems just a tad too cuddly to match up to the sad, gruesome reality. There is also a love scene with a guerrillera who wants to get out of the game, and at that point the movie just flies off the rails into fantasy land. We should all be so lucky if we get kidnapped!

The endless intractable violent conflict in Colombia certainly lends itself to dark comedy, but not to wishful thinking. There is a lot to like in this movie; it won the audience award at the Cartagena Film Festival for a reason. It aches for peace and condemns all the illegal armed groups perpetuating the conflict. Although it had a budget of under a million US dollars, it doesn’t look like it. During production, the cast and crew actually had to flee paramilitaries in the town of San Martin, and the film’s earnestness in the face of such threats is well-intentioned. But its fever dream of reluctant FARC members and bumbling paramilitaries is a little too much to swallow.

Colombian Cinema – Karen Llora en un Bus (Karen Cries on the Bus) – 2011

Director - Gabriel Rojas Vera

This movie excited me for two reasons wholly unrelated to the quality of the film. First, it’s always exciting to see Bogota on the big screen. To see a neighborhood you know, and match up its celluloid with the picture in your mind. I was there! La Candelaria, OMG! It’s not the most common occurrence, and it still feels cool. Second, I could understand this movie with absolutely no subtitles, the first time that has ever happened. It helped that they spoke with those famously clearly enunciated Bogota accents, and that I more or less know the slang here after living here for a few years. I even knew when Karen invited her boyfriend to Monserrate that he would say no, because a lot of people here believe that couples who visit Monserrate together will break up (Colombians are a superstitious lot). I felt a sense of accomplishment watching “Karen Llora en un Bus”, but that was a matter of this movie being in the right place and time in my life.

The film itself is not very good. The story it tells is entirely predictable and hard to relate to. Let’s take it from the top. Karen (Angela Carrizosa Aparicio) is a rich guy’s wife, and is expected to basically take care of him and do nothing else. We only start to know her when she is running away from her spouse, crying on the bus. She moves into a flophouse in the downtown La Candelaria neighborhood, and things start out difficult. She has to shower with cold water, and there are roaches in the bathroom. The other people who live in the building are more or less bemused by her horror – just take a shower and step on the bug, you spoiled princess! But this is a big change for her – no more luxuries. She is on her own now.

Gradually, she begins figuring out how to be independent. Turns out she has a hidden love for theater – she mentions Ibsen’s “A Doll’s House” as her current reading. But if she had this hidden aspiring dramatist beneath the doting housewife surface, why did she marry some rich guy with no personality in the first place? In another convenient plot twist, Karen is invited out by the young party girl who lives in the building for a double date with a rich married guy and his friend, who conveniently turns out to be a playwright himself! They talk of art, and drink beer in artsy La Candelaria cafes, and suddenly Karen feels alive with possibility. No more making coffee for Jose Q. Negociante, who nevertheless makes several failed attempts to get back together with Karen and apologize. We can see that it is over the last time they get together, when Karen substitutes the coffee her ex ordered for her with a beer, giving him the shock of his life. A woman drinking beer in the afternoon, the horror!

Sorry if there are spoilers here, but you will discover all of these plot “twists” a mile away as you watch this film anyway. You’ve seen the gringo version of this movie before, maybe in “Eat Pray Love” or any other film where a woman divorces her overbearing husband and starts really living. It is difficult to feel for a character like Karen; we never see any motivation for why she would ever marry a vanilla guy like her husband, and one wonders why she didn’t get cold feet beforehand. There are a couple scenes of her mother saying that Karen needs to go home and fix her marriage, but Karen shows a spine that apparently hadn’t existed before in refusing her mother’s demands. When is the moment that Karen realized the marriage was over? You’ll never know, because the film doesn’t show you. You could make another whole film with the parts missing in this movie that would make Karen seem selfish and less sympathetic for entering and leaving her marriage on a whim, and the overall message of this film seems to be “Get a hobby that your wife likes or she will leave you.”

Colombian Cinema – Las Colores de la Montaña (The Colors of the Mountain) (2010)

Director – Carlos Cesar Arbelaez

Manuel (Hernan Mauricio Ocampo) is a soccer-crazed boy who lives in rural Colombia. His farmer father, Ernesto (Hernan Mendez), gives him a ball for his birthday, replacing the ratty, beat-up ball that he used previously. Manuel and his friends play with the ball on the town’s only soccer field, until one day when an accident involving a runaway exploding pig reveals that the field is mined, probably due to military helicopters occasionally landing there to fight guerillas. But the kids don’t pay much attention to the conflict; the important thing is the ball. It’s plainly visible from the hill overlooking the field, and just sits there among the mines taunting the boys. They devise all sorts of crazy schemes to get the ball without accidentally setting off a mine, including lowering the albino, near-blind Poca Luz (Genaro Aristizabal) from a tree with a rope, or when Manuel throws small stones in his path to see if they explode, and then when they don’t, hopping on the exact spot where the stone hit the ground, getting ever closer to the ball.

In the background, the adults are getting caught up in the crossfire between illegal militias. Guerillas are demanding that all residents of the town join their side, and that Ernesto comes to their meetings. Ernesto doesn’t want to take sides; he has heard there are paramilitaries in the area that would kill anybody who collaborates with the guerillas, and mostly he just wants to be left alone to farm in peace. But even as he wants to ignore the illegal armed groups, the illegal armed groups don’t want to ignore him. One by one, students at Manuel’s school begin leaving, displaced by the violence and fleeing to anywhere else that will have them. Eventually, the teacher, who arrived from out of town, is also asked to leave after she covers some guerrilla graffiti on the school walls with a mural painted by the students.

The children’s acting in this film is fabulous. It would be easy to just make the kids as cute and tragic as possible, but the film just makes them seem normal. They don’t always understand what the adults are talking about, and are often told to stop listening in when the subject of local violence comes up. When Julian (Nolberto Sanchez) shows Manuel a bullet he has that can supposedly take down a helicopter (obtained from his guerilla brother), it almost doesn’t seem any more real than when I played with G.I. Joes at their age. The natural feel of their innocence is all the more remarkable considering that the cast is mostly comprised of non-actors from Northwestern Antioquia near the Panamanian border, where the movie was filmed. The scenery is also breathtaking, like one of those little rural mountainside towns you pass on the colectivo on your way to some other grand destination here. When the teacher gives Manuel a set of pencils to encourage his artistic ability, he sets about painting his own version of the landscape, which resembles a lush green Colombian Valhalla.

The Colors of the Mountain won the Audience Award at the Cartagena Film Festival, and has made the rounds at other festivals around the world. Director Carlos Cesar Arbelaez has said in interviews that he was inspired by Iranian film, and the movie moves at a fairly languid pace, letting you soak in the small-town ambience so that when the violence hits, it seems inexplicable. A sleepy farm town in the mountains, what could go wrong? In Colombia, everything can go wrong.