for Tribune: Berlinale 2015 – Hopes Rise in the Land of Eternal Spring

I said that, so far, I had found the Guatemalans a pretty gloomy bunch. Was this their experience?
…
“They’re heavy,” said the man in the turban, stroking his beard sagely. “But they’ve got a lot to be heavy about.”

Paul Theroux, The Great Patagonian Expess (1979), p125

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Quick: what’s your favourite Guatemalan movie? Those present at Berlin’s 65th International Film Festival (“Berlinale”) now have a ready answer to that tricky cultural poser thanks to Jayro Bustamante’s Ixcanul Volcano.

This was the central American nation’s first contender for top honours at one of Europe’s “big three” cinema showcases (Berlin, Cannes, Venice). And it didn’t go home empty-handed: the debut feature from 37-year-old Bustamante—a quietly atmospheric story of a superstition-blinkered Mayan family toiling for peanuts on a hillside coffee-plantation—took the Alfred Bauer Prize. This trophy, much prized among highbrow cinephiles and intended to honour a film “that opens new perspectives”, has previously been won by luminaries like Léos Carax, Tsai Ming-liang, Lucrecia Martel, Andrzej Wajda, Baz Luhrmann and Alain Resnais.

So while the award generated fewer international headlines than the Golden Bear—which went to Iran’s state-hounded, house-arrested Jafar Panahi (Taxi)—or Britain’s double acting triumphs via Charlotte Rampling and Sir Tom Courtenay (45 Years), it brings welcome attention to a land that’s languished far from most news-radars since the conclusion of a 36-year civil war in 1996.

A wedge-shaped country bordering Mexico (to the north and east), Belize, Honduras and El Salvador, the Bulgaria-sized republic’s Netherlands-sized population of 16 million includes 1992 Nobel Peace Prize winner Rigoberta Menchú—whose fellow Mayans suffered murderous repression under the US-backed reactionary governments of the 1970s and ’80s.

Not all American involvement here has been malign, however. In 1977 George Lucas dispatched a crew to Tikal, the ancient ruined city nestled among biodiverse rain-forests in Guatemala’s far north. In Star Wars, this lush backwater becomes Yavin-4, the rebel-stronghold moon (“it’s where all the idealists hang out, I hear”—Han Solo) whose planned obliteration by the Galactic Empire’s Death Star triggers the explosive, optimistic finale.

Lucas has never been noted for his political acumen, so his selection of locale was presumably made on purely aesthetic grounds rather than a desire to draw ironic parallels between his fantasy-universe and the shameful recent history of his imperialist fatherland. In 1954, Guatemala suffered the first CIA-backed coup outside the middle-east, when leftist president Jacobo Árbenz Guzmán was overthrown in favour of military officer Carlos Castillo Armas—the first in a grim series of dictatorial rulers.

Given the resulting turmoil and bloodshed in the “Land of Eternal Spring” (launchpad for the USA’s abortive assault on Cuba during the 1961 ‘Bay of Pigs’ fiasco) it’s no surprise that Guatemala failed to develop any kind of film industry. Luis Argueto’s The Silence of Neto, made just 21 years ago, is regarded as the first fully Guatemalan feature. And while Julio Hernández Cordón has put the country on the festival-circuit map with Gasolina (2008), Marimbas From Hell (2011) and Locarno-competing Dust (2012), the director himself hails from North Carolina.

In terms of film output, countries like Guatemala must currently rely on homegrown talent like Bustamante returning home after learning the ropes overseas. “People from my generation that want to do film in Guatemala usually had to study abroad,” he’s said. “The first film school in Guatemala was opened only 10 years ago, so it’s just starting. There are no laboratories, no cameras, or funds.” A born-and-bred Guatemalan, Bustamante studied film in Paris and Rome before making TV-commercials for Manhattan-based ad-giant Ogilvy & Mather; Ixcanul Volcano is a Guatemalan-French co-production, with post-production sound mixing by veteran Julien Cloquet (Betty Blue, Être et Avoir). Cinematographer Luis Armando Arteaga, whose natural lighting is crucial throughout, likewise boasts numerous international credits.

This slickness doesn’t detract from Ixcanul Volcano‘s authenticity—dialogue is mainly in the Mayan language Kaqchikel (the protagonists are barely-educated illiterates who can’t speak Spanish, and are thus easy prey for exploitative employers). But it does mean that the film is a long way from the undiluted glimpses of reality that one can stumble across in documentaries.

The elephant in the room is that ordinary Guatemalans (especially downtrodden indigenous peoples) like their kin in so many poorer nations, simply have no way of making viewable films given the current, screamingly unequal systems of finance, exhibition and distribution which prevail across the globe. Systems which mega-bucks festivals like the Berlinale, with their red-carpet fixation, atavistic sub-Hollywood glamour and tiresome parade of familiar names (Herzog, Wenders and Greenaway all competed this year) unthinkingly perpetuate; systems which, because of their hideous structural imbalances, can yield only a stuntedly narrow and unrepresentative medium. How many great voices are going unheard? How many

This isn’t to say that the Berlinale was devoid of artistic achievement, of course. Terence Malick’s vaultingly ambitious Knight of Cups and Pablo Larraín’s tough parable The Club elevated the Competition. The parallel Forum section, a reliable source of adventurous fare and notable new names, yielded a trio of strong documentaries—all debuts—which illustrated the benefit of intimate proximity to one’s chosen subject.

Francesco Clerici, responsible for the wonderfully simple, daringly direct and grittily beautiful Hand Gestures, stumbled across his material on his Milan door-step when he realised he lived only yards from a long-established bronze foundry. Michel K. Zongo, director of Burkina Faso’s The Siren of Faso Fani, has relatives who worked in the textile-factory which his movie so colourfully chronicles—and whose senseless closure, dictated by neo-liberal IMF and World Bank dogma, devastated his city’s economy. Vladimir Tomić’s sprightly Flotel Europa is even more autobiographical: visuals consist entirely of video-footage shot when Tomić, his brother and mother were evacuated from the Bosnian war to a floating “hotel” in Copenhagen.

Of course, if an unknown like Bustamante had elected to make a documentary instead of fiction—Ixcanul Volcano is based on a true story—he wouldn’t have had a hope of making the main competition. Berlinale, which started in 1951, had no doc up for top gongs until 2008 and Errol Morris’s Standard Operating Procedure. Only established giants of the non-fiction world—such as Chile’s Patricio Guzmán, whose The Pearl Button took Best Screenplay this year—get to bid for gold here, and the victory of Gianfranco Rosi’s Sacro GRA at Venice in 2013 means Berlin is the only one of the “big three” never to have been won by a documentary. That non-fiction works, even those of obvious merit, are so blithely and unthinkingly relegated to second-class status, in Berlin and beyond, is just one symptom of a supposedly global and democratic art whose priorities have been so horribly out of whack for so long that hardly anyone seems to notice—let alone care.

Neil Young
17th February 2015
written for Tribune magazine

Berlinale 2015 – index page