"Como el cielo después de llover" (2020): A first-person documentary with a Latin American twist

Below are the program notes I wrote about Como el cielo después de llover (2020, Colombia) directed Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo. The film was screened by the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles in June of 2023. 

The Nueva Onda selection of the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles Como el cielo después de llover, the debut film of Colombian director Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, is a remarkable documentary. It is also an interesting complement to last year’s screening of the excellent Feral, the debut feature by Mexican director Andrés Kaiser, a self-assured exploration of psychological horror and the documentary style.
 
Como el cielo después de llover, distributed internationally as The Calm after the Storm, falls in the category of the first-person documentary essay. This type of nonfiction work has gained recognition as a specific and very plastic mode of film practice.  It combines the documenting of a reality – in this case, the making of a fiction film in Medellín, Colombia - with an impulse to shape it also as an essay about the nature of cinema and the director’s approach to it.
 

This description may seem very abstract and removed from the experience of going to the movies for fun. Far from it. The film is fascinating at several levels, and it’s really entertaining. It is made of several pieces, that quickly begin to fit into a larger project that is fully laid out by the end of the film. First, Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo (she uses her father and mother’s last names) is the daughter of the famed Colombian writer and director Victor Gaviria, well known for his sociopolitical chronicles of the underprivileged: Rodrigo D. No Future (1990) and The Rose Seller (1998). Born in 1992, Mercedes studied filmmaking, with a specialty in sound design, at the prestigious Universidad del Cine, in Buenos Aires, Argentina. While in film school, she directed shorts and collaborated in other projects, in tune with the small-scale, first-person hybrid projects of a generation of Argentine filmmakers like Lucrecia Martel, Mariano Llinás and Rodrigo Moreno. In their works, less is more, silence and the unsaid have a symbolic dimension, and social and political issues emerge ambiguously.  In other words, the daughter’s cinema is in the antipodes of the “pornomiseria” cinema of her father, as some critics have described Gaviria’s work and that of another key representative, Héctor Babenco and his seminal Pixote (1980). They are blunt critiques of Latin American social problems.
 

The core of Gaviria Jaramillo’s documentary is herself participating in the shoot of her father’s latest film The Animal’s Wife (2016), based on a true story of gender violence, machismo and silence among the lumpen class in Medellín. Though we never see Mercedes on screen since she is the one operating the camera, the filmmaker is the voiceover documenting the experience. The shoot Mercedes records is, however, part of a larger project: making a diary of her personal and professional life, beginning and ending in Buenos Aires, where she now works, with Medellín as the long dramatic interlude.  
 
The record of Mercedes’ life interweaves two other key elements: the home movies her father made in the 1990s when she was growing up in Colombia (not edited chronologically) and the diary her mother wrote as an anxious young woman expecting her first child. What slowly emerges is the portrait of a family, including a younger brother, who may or may not be a rebel. It is a subtle domestic depiction, sightly unsettling. It combines her insights and memories while viewing the footage, with a selection of images and sound design, shaped by Mercedes “interrogating” the past. A short interview with her maternal grandmother provides an intriguing twist and a socioeconomic comment. 
 

This documentary essay functions as a Rorschach test, open to as many interpretations as there are viewers. For some, Como el cielo después de llover can be a feminist take on patriarchy, deploring machismo at the level of the story and the storyteller; for others, it is the record of a young filmmaker finding herself, as a woman and an artist. Other viewers may appreciate it as an open-ended meditation on the role and responsibility of cinema in a violent society.  
 
But what will come through in all the viewing experiences is the quiet, self-assured voice of a young woman observing the dynamics of a Hispanic family, the role of women with professional aspirations, and ultimately, the question of how she should live her life.  
 

In the final sequence – a long take of a long shot of Mercedes facing the open-ended pampas - her voiceover encapsulates the film’s topics.  “The family conversations set up the world we share, and give our future a meaning”, she begins. Like the great Colombian writer Guillermo García Márquez building his Macondo from family memories, it is with them, Mercedes notes, that “we can put together a story”.   And then she recites, in slow cadence, single words, phrases, complete sentences:
 

“I remember the crying in the fiction. A woman’s crying. Fear. An outraged body … as if it were a doll. The feminine. To have a brother. Medellín. Usefulness. To leave hours of the past as an inheritance to your children. To smoke some weed on a large stone. The images in the diary. Poetry. Colombian cinema. To confuse sensitivity with being gay. Desire. To be a prostitute. Men and women’s unequal time when raising a child. A little girl’s ideals. Buenos Aires. To record everything on a camera. To choose the right distance. To embrace the unspoken. The other. To think about the victim’s point of view. The hit men. The contradiction of filming a rape scene being the privileged gender. A set full of men. To take years to make a film. To be a sound mixer. Plants that fall asleep when you touch them. Cocaine. Evil’s presence. To write to your daughter before she is born. Uprooting. Testimony. Non actors. To choose silence. The beauty of ambiguity. Humaneness. The inevitable. To talk about gender violence in a country that is suffering war. A first-time mother.  Future “yes”. A family portrait. A stoical woman. To be and not being at the same time. Uncertainty. Conviction. To love contradiction. To wish to go back. To choose the South. To feel determined air”.

 

This litany contains the conundrums and certainties of life, “el oficio de vivir” (the business of living) if I may paraphrase the Spanish philosopher Julián Marías. Como el cielo después de llover is a beautifully accomplished first-person documentary. It feels as innovative a film today as was the New Latin American Boom of the 1960s and 70s.
 
                       List of sources
 
Alter, Nora M. The Essay Film After Fact and Fiction. New York: Columbia University Press, 2018.
 
Ham, Ally. The Calm After the Storm. Video Librarian website, June 6, 2022.
https://videolibrarian.com/reviews/documentary/the-calm-after-the-storm/
 
Lukasievicz, Mauro, “Entrevista a Mercedes Gaviria Jaramillo, directora de Como el cielo después de llover”. Revista Caligari, n/d.
https://caligari.com.ar/entrevista-a-mercedes-gaviria-jaramillo-directora-de-como-el-cielo-despues-de-llover/
 
Program notes, Harvard Film Archive screening, September 25, 2022.
https://harvardfilmarchive.org/calendar/the-devil-never-sleeps-2022-09
 
Interview, “Mercedes Gaviria narra cómo es "convivir con el cine dentro de la casa" en su ópera prima. Télam, March 3, 2022”
https://www.telam.com.ar/notas/202203/585233-mercedes-gaviria-narra-como-es-convivir-con-el-cine-dentro-de-la-casa-en-su-opera-prima.html,
 
Wilson, Rebecca,“Fatherhood, Family and Filmmaking in The Calm After the Storm”. Sounds and Colors website, January 13, 2022.
https://soundsandcolours.com/articles/colombia/fatherhood-family-and-filmmaking-in-the-calm-after-the-storm-64389/