The dreams of a Costa Rican family

“Being in two places at once … like walking in between …” A US documentary observes the dreams of a Costa Rican family.

Not Here, Not There [Ni aquí, ni allá] (2009) written, directed and produced by Betsy Haley Hershey 63 minutos

Like many recent films on the subject, Betsy Haley Hershey’s debut documentary feature Not Here, Not There succeeds in painting the large picture of Latin American illegal immigration to the United States through a small-scale family story. The director met them in rural Costa Rica several years ago in an exchange program. Making a meager living in a coffee plantation, four of the six siblings trekked to the US and landed restaurant jobs in the East Coast, where other people from their small mountain village had settled. The parents stayed behind with the two youngest, a boy and a girl, Salomé. It is a middle class family, aspiring to higher education and understanding the realities of an interconnected world.

Between 2006 and 2008, the director observed how the family dynamics was shaped by two geographical locations, two languages and wildly contrasting cultures - split between the “here” and “there” of the title. Half-way through the shooting, the family is struck by tragedy. Astutely, the filmmaker combined the techniques of direct cinema – requiring long hours of shooting and remarkable editing skills – with the abundant visual materials supplied by the family members themselves: home videos, photographs and letters.

What emerges in Not Here, Not There is a beautiful and poignant family portrait built as a counterpoint between life in the United States – access to material goods but the looming threat of deportation– and the rural scenes of a emotionally fulfilling Costa Rican home, where progress is limited. This pendulum is at first somewhat disconcerting to the audience; we are lost about the exact physical and psychological whereabouts of the six siblings and their parents, since there is no objective narrator or chronological timeline to explain the sequence of events. It is a crosscutting technique, however, that will pay good dividends: it not only provides the pendular structure of the documentary, but also reflects its very meaning, nicely encapsulated in the title. “Your body is in one place, your heart in another”, the Costa Rican wife of the older brother explains to the director, thus providing a rationale to the open-ended story unfolding on the screen.

Who can be familiar with the many documentaries exploring the immigration conundrum with ethnographic zeal? So Ms. Hershey may not know that her film, much like Zulay, Facing the 21st Century (1989), by renowned documentarian Jorge Preloran, ends ups giving the subjects of her picture a strong directorial role. Many years in the making, the Los Angeles-based Argentine filmmaker and UCLA professor documented with his anthropologist wife Mabel, the process of uprooting undergone by a young Otavalo Indian from Ecuador, who came to live with them in Los Angeles. Such was the involvement of Zulay Saravino in the filmic recording of her cultural and emotional changes – including a strong presence in the editing choices – that Preloran gave her a directing credit. A similar process seems to be at work in Not Here, Not There: the documentary is firmly held by the candid narration provided by Salomé, a naturally eloquent young voice, and the home movies supplied by her older brothers.

Also, like the heart-warming, heart-wrenching and equally open-ended Mexican feature by Patricia Riggen, La misma luna (Under the Same Moon, 2007), Not Here, Not There cannot have a resolution. For the illegal immigrants of this family, struggling in the “Here” of the United States, the American Dream is intangible; from the “There” of Costa Rica, the American Dream becomes a Rorschach inkblot into which they see their many aspirations. The film chooses to end with two of the brothers retracing the steps of their dangerous first journey from Costa Rica to the United States. Where is their home …?

What will captivate the viewers of this topnotch documentary is the delicate touch with which Ms. Hershey reveals the all too human and universal longings of a family like us.


Not Here, Not There has been seen in a few festivals and collected several awards over the past year. More information is available at http://www.notherenotthere.com/
I hope the documentary receives the exposure and recognition it deserves.

Flor silvestre - The Hollywood style in Revolutionary Mexico

The Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles, a cultural organization sponsoring the screening of classic and contemporary Latin American cinema since the late 1990s, will be doing one of their programs as part of the Los Angeles Conservancy long-standing series “Last Remaining Seats”. On June 23, 2010, it will screen Flor silvestre (Wild Flower, 1943) in the lovingly restored Million Dollar Theatre.

This is the deluxe theater where Sid Grauman launched his Los Angeles operations in 1918. Designed by Albert C. Martin and adorned with sculptures by Joseph Mora, the building’s ornamentation is Churrigueresque, Spain’s idiosyncratic rendition of the Baroque style. The theater’s pièce de résistence is the auditorium designed by William Woollett, with a beautiful coffered dome and ornate organ grilles. From 1950 until the late 1980s, the theater presented Spanish-language films and variety performances, or “variedades”, imported from Mexico. After renovations and upgrades, the theater reopened in 2008.

I have been writing some of Cinemateca bilingual program notes for these events since 2005. Michael Díaz, the founder and motor behind this lovely institution, asked me to prepare some comments on their summer screening, Flor silvestre.

I transcribe below the short text I wrote – more academic than conversational, as a blog would require. It is, however, a good point of entry to ponder the influence of the Hollywood visual and directing style on a team that formed the style and content of Mexican cinema, national and patriotic, for over two decades.

A period melodrama set during the 1910 Revolution, Flor silvestre is considered a classic work of Mexico’s Golden Era. This intimate yet universal love story fatefully shaped by the turmoil of social and political change resonates today.

The plot is anchored in the class and ideological divisions boiling under the surface of the iron stability brought by the Porfirio Díaz regime: A young peasant, Esperanza (Dolores del Río), marries José Luis Castro (Pedro Armendáriz), the son of the region’s powerful landowner. His parents coldly reject Esmeralda: “We all occupy a place in life, and those at the bottom (“los de abajo”), no matter how much they dream, will always remain below”, warns his mother. Soon the winds of the Revolution – in which José Luis participates – sweep over the valley, a tumultuous mix of idealists, reformers, opportunists and thieves. The murder of the patriarch by bandits pretending to be revolutionaries forces José Luis – now the father of a newborn – to honor an ancestral code of revenge, with tragic results. The story unfolds as a flashback, recounted by Esperanza to her now adult son, reflecting that modern Mexico has been built on its past, the land and the dead.

Flor silvestre made beautiful Dolores del Río a star of the Mexican cinema. She was already in her late thirties, and this was her first Spanish-language production. Her Hollywood career in the 20s and 30s playing exotic women had petered out. Paradoxically, the opportunity offered by Emilio Fernández, a director working in the classic studio style, to play a young naive character (the reverse of her Hollywood persona) became the first of their many notable collaborations, most famously María Candelaria (1944).

It also marked the first time Gabriel Figueroa, a cinematographer trained by Gregg Toland in ground-breaking photographic techniques and powerfully influenced by the Mexican muralists, European painting and Sergei Eisenstein, worked with Fernández. Screenwriter Mauricio Magdaleno was brought on board, for the first also of many projects together. Established star Pedro Armendáriz would be paired again with Dolores del Río in María Candelaria and other Mexican classics.

In Flor silvestre Fernández and Figueroa began to develop a highly pictorial visual style, including a type of narrative and characters that defined Mexican cinema and “Mexicanness” in the 1940s. These films were lyrical and patriotic, and they celebrated not only the country’s geographical beauty but also idealized its indigenous population, showcasing them as archetypal figures steeped in tragedy and fatalism. Dolores del Río and Pedro Armendáriz are the first of many ill-fated couples: in Flor silvestre they embody the tragedy of lovers destroyed by social prejudice and incomprehension.

The film is a visual delight. The audience will appreciate the beautiful way Figueroa’s camera sculpts the human figures and a landscape of clouds and maguey using chiaroscuro techniques and curvilinear perspective with expressionistic effects. Many scenes come to mind: the murdered father’s wake, staged like the painting El requiem by Orozco; the singers on horseback playing their guitars, their song commenting on the story; the agitated crows in the climax of the film.

The handling of Dolores del Río is also very interesting: while her delicate features are enhanced by classic Hollywood lighting, the director guides her performance in a way that keeps her sensuality but obliterates the exoticism of her American career. The strong inner beauty the actress showed in Flor silvestre would become part of her screen persona from then on. (A case in point, Don Siegel’s Flaming Star (1960), where the actress is the feminine and resilient Kiowa mother of a brown-skinned Elvis Presley).

Oscars ephemera

A quick e-mail yesterday from the web commentary editor of the New York Times led to a 300-word piece on the connection between artistry and the Academy Awards.

Los Angeles has been buzzing these past days – print, radio, television – with Oscar talk. Everybody has an opinion … democracy at work, as the said NYT forum shows.

Since I jotted down a few comments about international cinema and the Oscars, the editor titled my paragraphs … "Kurosawa in Hollywood".

Below is what I wrote.

French writer and cultural minister André Malraux once noted that cinema is an industry that sometimes disguises itself as art. The paradox at the heart of film — an object manufactured for mass consumption as well as a thing of beauty capturing the human experience — is also one embedded in the Academy itself.

The Oscars have always helped familiarize American audiences with foreign cinema.
It is after all a trade organization founded in 1927 to counter the notion that Hollywood was a purely business proposition.

There is no mathematical formula to gauge the economic impact of an Oscar nomination or win on a given film. Similarly, it is difficult to argue that the Academy Awards promote artistry and experimentation, since there are so many other factors at play when a member casts his vote.


In the case of foreign cinema, the Oscars have always helped familiarize American audiences with films and directors embraced by critics — Kurosawa, Fellini, Bergman, Buñuel and an illustrious list of contemporary artists. If anything, Oscars for foreign films show that Hollywood is not provincial.

Foreign film winners tend to show a balance between the tried-and-true approach and the innovative, both in subject matter and style. And this becomes evident if you quickly peruse the list of winners since the category began in 1947.

However, who can predict if on Sunday the more “standard” Argentine nominee, El Secreto de Sus Ojos (The Secret in Their Eyes), a TV-style crime narrative with a twist, will win over two visually innovative, stark dramas laced with social and political commentary — Das Weisse Band (The White Ribbon) and Un Prophète(The Prophet) — which are artistic nuts more difficult to crack?

Maria Elena de las Carreras, a Fulbright scholar from Argentina, is a visiting professor at University of California, Los Angeles and Cal State Northridge. She is a regular collaborator of the Los Angeles Latino International Film Festival and the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles.



The link for the NYT Room for Debate forum:

http://roomfordebate.blogs.nytimes.com/2010/03/04/do-the-oscars-undermine-artistry/

The UCLA connection

The six degrees of separation work in unexpected, whimsical ways. What do two beautifully crafted Japanese films – Ototo and Kyoto Story, by veteran Yoji Yamada – have in common with Zona Sur, the no-holds barred metaphorical critique of upper class Bolivians, directed by US-trained Juan Carlos Valdivia? Nothing at all, if one looks at how film technique, storytelling and human emotions are handled. There is no connection either between a filmmaker in his eighties, who looks at people and cities with affection and nostalgia, and a young director from Latin America with a knack for casting and an ax to grind at his social milieu. To use a quick film history shortcut, both are as far apart as John Ford and Luis Buñuel.

However, a connection, both geographical and academic can be established, when one realizes that Ichiro Yamamoto, the producer of the Japanese films, and Zona Sur cinematographer Paul de Lumen coincided at the Department of Film, TV and Digital Media between 2006 and 2007. They probably never met, but both certainly benefited from the talents and possibilities offered by our film school and the UCLA infrastructure.


A veteran producer at Shochiku – one of the major Japanese studios, already a hundred years old, and the home of Yazujiro Ozu and Kenji Mizoguchi, among others – Mr. Yamamoto came to Los Angeles in 2006 on a sabbatical of sorts to learn in situ about the workings of contemporary Hollywood and imbibe the history of American cinema through classes and screenings – moving around the city by bus. Friendly to professors and students, and enthusiastic about the possibility to learn, he also had much to give. I invited him to talk about the state of Japanese production to my students in a class on the history of Asian, African and Latin American cinema in the summer of 2007. He used as an example Yamada’s Love and Honor (2006), which he co-wrote and produced. Ichiro expanded on the connections between Ozu, Kurosawa and Yamada, and their links to Shochiku studios. For one hour, the masters came to life and Japanese culture and values – as embodied in these directors – were lovingly discussed.

Mr. Yamada is in Berlin to showcase the latest work by Yamada: Ototo is the closing film of the Berlinale, and Kyoto Story was selected for the Forum. In a visual style reminiscent of Ozu and broaching a similar subject matter – six decades later – the films are delicate explorations of family and social relations, among ordinary people caught in situations of change and upheaval. They celebrate traditional values, much in the John Ford style, with a scent of nostalgia and a love for goodness. Paul Schrader might look at these pictures of Yamada as examples of ‘transcendental style. These two films, as well as the samurai trilogy preceding them – The Twilight Samurai (2002), The Hidden Blade (2004) and Love and Honor (2006) – would be a programming coup for the Billy Wilder Theater.

I had read about the successful career of Zona Sur – recent awards at Sundance for writing and directing, and the cinematography prize at Huelva, a Spanish festival devoted to Hispanic cinemas. Shown to a packed audience at the Berlinale – unfortunately minus the director and other cast and crew members, who had already left the city – the film is an impressive work, by itself and also as an example of social critique in the grand Latin American tradition.

Zona Sur is centered on a patrician and seemingly wealthy family of La Paz, headed by an elegant and tough matriarch. Not unlike Y tu mamá también in its portrait of a self-centered privileged milieu, the film subtly becomes a metaphor for Bolivia’s contemporary social and political dynamics. It avoids the trite left-wing clichés of established Latin American political cinema – and even the magical realism attached to it in the 1980s and 90s – to provide a ferocious critique of present day Bolivia, where both the Spanish-descent ruling class and the Indian masses in the Evo Morales era are reassessing themselves. This state of turmoil is stunningly captured by the sophisticated use of the camera: 360-degree pan shots, mostly of interior scenes in a beautiful home perched on the hills. At first, one wonders about this bravura camera work until it becomes evident that the meaning of Zona Sur is visually embedded in this graceful but implacable movement: the family, and by extension, the Bolivian upper echelon, is trapped in a circle of false appearances and hypocrisy. Only at the end, the camera leaves ground and literally flies unbound into the sky. In the last scene, it returns to its graceful movement to present a sweetly ironic portrait of (wishful) racial and social harmony.

Carl Laemmle – “Der Pionier von Hollywood” - at the UFA Fabrik
The UFA Fabrik is a vast cultural and ecological center in Tempelhof, a neighborhood in southern Berlin. Its oldest buildings date from the 1920s, and they were used by the UFA studio after it moved to suburban Potsdam as its post-production center. Its state-of-the art theater at the time, is still in use today. There, Carl Laemmle, founder of Universal, received a lovely homage, on the occasion of the centennial of his first feature film Hiawatha – recently shown at the Academy as part of its 1909 program. The print came from the UCLA Archive, and before its screening, Dr. Udo Bayer, director of the Laupheim Museum, in Laemmle’s hometown, gave a short talk about the pioneer’s early years in southern Germany and his life in the US, illustrated by photos.

UCLA was greatly thanked for loaning the print – that looked lovely in that historical theater – and its charming director Siegrid Niemer and associates hoped that this would be the beginning of a steady collaboration in film programming.

The UFA Fabrik has an informative website, in German and English, found at www.ufafabrik.de, with interesting historical facts and a detailed account of its multiple activities.

The Return of History

The Berlinale is a natural fit for documentaries and fiction films dealing with German history and politics. And every year the festival presents intriguing or polemical works shedding light on a still painful 20th century. Two documentaries in the Panorama section brought to the forefront aspects of that perennial staple, the Third Reich: German filmmaker Ilona Ziok’s Fritz Bauer – Death by Instalments, and young Israeli director Yael Hersonski’s A Film Unfinished.

The remarkable historical documentaries of Ms. Ziok deserve wider circulation and are certainly inspirational to those interested in the craft of writing history with visual materials: Kurt Gerrons Karusell, The Sounds of Silents, The Count and the Comrade. German art and politics are interwoven in a complex tapestry where the individuals at the heart of these stories become emblematic of their times – a German Jewish actor of the Weimar cinema era, a pianist of silent cinema in Berlin, an aristocrat and a communist whose paths cross in a concentration camp and symbolize post-war Germany. In her brand-new documentary, the director examines the career of Fritz Bauer, a no-nonsense German Jewish lawyer who became the chief prosecutor of Nazi crimes. A finely tuned piece of non-chronological editing, the documentary has as its linchpin an extended interview with Bauer made for German television of the 1960s. In the guise of a conversation with young people, Bauer summarizes the legal and moral implications of these crimes, less than a generation away, and urges the country to proceed with the prosecution of those responsible. Interspersed with interviews to family members, friends and colleagues, the documentary recurs to archival materials, including newsreel footage of my hometown of Buenos Aires at the time of the capture of Eichmann by Israeli intelligence forces, acting on information provided by Bauer. By the 1960s the prosecutor had despaired that the German legal system would bring this and other criminals to justice.

Today, Fritz Bauer seems to be largely under the historical radar, as the questions from the all-German audience at the screening I attended seemed to reflect. I remembered that the prosecutor in The Reader is patterned after Bauer; the film, like this documentary, ends up being not only about the responsibility of individual Germans in the commission of crimes during the war, but also about the price paid by a society as a whole. Without being didactic or preachy, the documentary succeeds in making this courageous tough-as-nails prosecutor embody the voice of moral clarity in post-war Germany. The fateful end of Bauer (quickly ruled as a ‘suicide’, in spite of evidence to the contrary at the times) brings an element of suspense to the biography. The choice of music by composer Manuel Göttsching combines Gorecki’s Third Symphony, a work of mourning for the victims of the he Holocaust, with Frank Sinatra singing ‘I did it my way’ when the credits roll. These are one of several bold choices.

The profound impact of A Film Unfinished lies in the intelligent handling of the subject matter: footage of the Warsaw Ghetto taken in 1942 for use in a German propaganda film surfaced in a GDR archive in the late 1980s. A Film Unfinished is the historical investigation of how this roughly edited hour-long material was shot. What emerges is a detective’s account of an unfinished propaganda project, with its emotional punch provided by survivors of this horrific episode of WWII, who watch the footage unfold and provide an eye witness account of how it got made. The use of diaries, German reports and even the words of one of the cameramen (in a reenactment) create a polyphonic if disturbing effect. The unadulterated use of the footage – as found in four cans, without soundtrack, listed as “Ghetto, 1942” – would have made this descent into the horror unbearable, as the filmmaker wisely noted after the screening. What the documentary brings, however, is another dimension to the horror: by uncovering the ‘staged’ the reality of the images themselves (hunger and death don’t even begin to paint the picture of the physical and spiritual indignities), A Film Unfinished gives this very ‘staginess’ a ‘documentary’ reality. In this sense, when the director decides to stage the interview with the cameraman who died a few years before (and whose words come verbatim from a legal document, she pointed out), she is doing the exact same thing the original material did, the ‘manipulation’ of reality. Hersonki is, in fact, not only showing the footage as shot but also commenting on its nature. Not quite a first person narrative – even though the director is the voiceover narrator – the documentary begins and ends in a deeply symbolic manner: the camera tracks slowly through a corridor to find the shelf where the cans are kept – it is the filmmaker’s journey into a heart of darkness.

The screening of the German competition entry Jud Süss, the Rise and Fall could have provided an interesting complement to these two documentaries, as a biopic-style account of how the historical novel by the German Jewish writer Feuchtwanger became an anti-Semitic Nazi film. Barely rising above the level of a TV movie, melodramatic and shallow, it makes one fondly recall Tarantino’s witty take on German propaganda films in Inglorious Basterds …

These notes are far from light and conversational in tone, as would befit the Blog Café … Perhaps next time I should dwell on two lovely Bollywood films, that use of the genre’s conventions to explore serious social and political issues … singing and dancing: My Name is Khan and Peepli Live … But now it’s off to the movies again …

From Berlin

One of the challenges of landing in the crowded pad of huge film festival like the 60th Berlinale, is to hit the ground running – a complex task requiring scheduling skills, a good press badge and physical stamina.
Serendipity plays a big role – not all the films will be equally relevant or interesting - and sometimes just luck, or buzz or even a hunch will make you discover a gem.

The lights go off, the screen lights up and you surrender to the delights of an imaginary world. The ‘tabula rasa’ approach is one way to keep your impressions and thoughts as free as possible from expectations. Reviews and interviews, press kits and promotional materials are best left for after the viewing, to keep a sense of wonder. This 60th edition of the Berlinale - running from February 11 to 22, 2010 - is no exception.

The delights of seeing works by established directors are many – mainly, the conversations among the films themselves and the connections the viewer can trace. Discovering a new filmmaker – or one known only by reading about his reputation – is a treat that often happens in a festival.

A few examples about well-know directors who contributed to an exciting launch of the Berlinale. Martin Scorsese’s Shutter Island impresses as a commercial project undertaken with gusto by an enthusiastic kid with a big box of tools.
This horror story staring a haggardly-looking Leonardo Di Caprio as a marshall with a traumatic secret is a triumph of style over content, a thrill ride about another beleaguered male at odds with the world, a muted version of taxi drivers and boxers, with a somewhat predictable narrative twist.

If Scorsese is all melodramatic flourishes – with echoes of Bernard Hermman and Hitchcockian touches – Roman Polanski’s doom and gloom The Ghostwriter, with Ewan McGregor and Pierce Brosnan, is a timely reminder of how character, story and logic function at the hands of a master at the top of his game. Based on a British novel about a thinly disguised Tony Blair, out of power and writing a tell-all memoir, The Ghostwriter is a return to the political thriller. Even though the central contention of the film comes across as silly – the British Prime Minister of the Bush second era is a puppet of the CIA – it is fun to see in McGregor a variation of Polanski’s concern with characters searching for the truth and paying dearly for it … The ghosts of Rosemary’s Baby and Tess float in the background, as does Hitchcock and his haunted houses, ugly guilts and innocents hounded by evil. Polanski himself was an absence deeply present on the red carpet of the Berlinale Palast.

Zhang Yimou’s refreshing period comedy A Woman, a Gun and a Noodle Soup – his first in an international career that started in the Berlinale 20 years ago – is a funny take on the Coen brother’s own cinematic debut Blood Simple. Marrying noir elements to slapstick, bright colors, spectacular scenery and jabs at the westernization of China, the film has the potential to be an international crowd-pleaser. At the heart is the typical Zhang Yimou conflict, a woman struggling against oppression – in this case an old, rich and mean husband. But the director has strayed far from Red Sorghum, Raise the Red Lantern and his other metaphorical critiques of the Chinese history and politics on which he built his international reputation. The anthological moment in this story of greed and revenge is a beautifully choreographed kitchen scene where the making of noodle dough is given a graceful and swift Hong Kong sword play treatment.

Rob Epstein and Jeffrey Friedman’s Howl, about the writing of the Allen Ginsberg poem does not compete with these films at the level of spectacle, but it is a worthy contender for the finely crafted performance of UCLA alum James Franco.
Imaginatively combining four narrative threads and breaking up the chronology, the film illustrates the struggles of an unknown poet struggling for recognition in the 1950s. The obscenity trial to the publishers of the poem (using court records) is interspersed with a reading of Howl by Ginsberg (Franco in the trademark thick glasses of Ginsberg) in San Francisco in 1955, alternating also with a psychedelic animation of the poem and Franco again in a long interview, using a collage of published materials.

Berlin offers other film-related delights even though squeezing them between screenings is no easy task. Of interest to the academics and film buffs is the exhibit on Fritz Lang's Metropolis at the Filmmuseum, showcasing the saga of its most recent reconstruction – the 2010 restored version premiered last Friday at the Berlinale. Also not to be missed is the homage to Universal founder Carl Laemmle on the centennial of Hiawatha, the first production of his Imp company. It will be at the UFA Fabrik, a cultural center functioning in the buildings where the UFA studios had their sound labs. The UCLA Film & Television Archive provides the print.