Cinemap: South America

One of my favorite things about Letterboxd, the popular Goodreads style tracking website for movies, is having personal statistics.  When you have a “Pro” level membership to the site it will allow you access to a page that tracks all sorts of things like who your most watched actors and directors are and what your average ratings are.  One of the coolest things about this stat page is this “world map” at the bottom of the page showing every country you’ve seen a movie from and if you move your cursor over any given country it will tell you how many movies you’ve seen from that country.  According to these statistics I’ve logged well over three thousand movies form the United States, close to six hundred from France, and around two hundred form Japan.  There are of course any number of countries I’ve only seen a couple of movies from, but what really irks me is the number of countries that are presently not filled in at all on my map.  It’s in this place where the map is filled in extensively enough that I have this tantalizing desire to use this to track things such that one day I could say that I’ve seen at least one movie from every country in the world.

And it’s with that goal in mind that I am starting a new series of “crash course” types articles in which I watch a half dozen or so movies from a given region in hopes of filling in large voids on that map.  For my first series I’m looking at a continent that is in some ways generally under-exposed in terms of filmmaking but which is also kind of easy to fill in simply because it has relatively large countries and that is South America.  At present, I’ve already seen movies from seven of the thirteen countries in that continent: Brazil, Columbia, Venezuela, Peru, Chile, Argentina and Uruguay.  Now there are asterisks to that because what Letterboxd considers to be a movie from a country is often unintuitive thanks to co-productions.  For example, the only reason that Venezuela is filled in for me is because I’ve seen the movie Embrace of the Serpent, which the site counts as a co-production of that country, Columbia, and Argentina but it’s directed by a Columbian and is generally considered a product of that country in terms of things like Academy Awards submissions.  Similarly, I’ve only been able to fill in Uruguay because of the movie Monos, which Letterboxd counts toward the tallies of ten different countries across three continents but which I think takes place in Columbia as well.  But the most dubious of all is Peru, which Letterboxd generously says I’ve seen a movie from because I’ve logged Burden of Dreams, the documentary about the making of a Werner Herzog film that was filmed in that country but is clearly a European production about a European director.

So clearly this isn’t an exact science but for the purposes of this exercise I’m just going with what Letterboxd says counts and in the coming month I’m going to try to fill in the remaining gaps for that continent which are: Paraguay, Bolivia, Ecuador, Guyana, Suriname, and French Guyana.  Now, I’m going to try not to cheat too much in my movie selections on this.  If I wanted to there are some English language Hollywood style movies that Letterboxd considers to be movies from these places but I’m going to try to avoid those and pick things that are more clearly culturally relevant.  “Try” is perhaps the key word there.  At the end of the day there are some relatively slim pickings in some of these places and I do not have the time and energy to try to hunt down difficult to find “classics” from these countries if I can’t easily find them and I will by and large be rolling with whatever I can find on streaming and that’s largely going to skew towards contemporary titles.

Paraguay: 7 Boxes (2012)

I’m going to start my South American cinematic tour in Paraguay a landlocked country that acts as something of a buffer between Brazil and Argentina.  The country does not have a particularly long or rich cinematic history outside of co-productions with Argentina but things are starting to get going a bit as of late and one of their bigger successes is the movie I’ll be looking at today: 2012’s 7 Boxes, a thriller which is probably the most mainstream of the movies I’ll be looking at through this six movie series and thus a logical starting point.  The film was co-directed by Juan Carlos Maneglia and Tana Schémbori and begins with a desperate seventeen year old taking a job for $100 USD to deliver seven mysterious boxes he’s not supposed to open to various locations within this market district.  As it turns out there were some misunderstandings amongst the criminals involved in stuffing those boxes and now they’re trying to get them back.  Not a terrible setup for a thriller but the movie doesn’t really stick with the young protagonist who’s in trouble as much as I would have liked, it instead spends a lot of time with the criminals and police chasing after them and that sort of distracts from the suspense of being in the middle of all this.  One gets the impression at times that it wants to be some sort of “hyperlink” movie with multiple storylines converging but I’m not sure that was the best idea.  There is interest in this from a sociological perspective though as Asunción is a not very widely seen location for stories like this and the market this is set in is kind of interesting.  There’s also something of a sub theme to the movie about the country’s hyper-inflation at the time, establishing early on that that $100 bill that the kid is working for is worth something like $100,000 in the local currency, though I’m not sure this ultimately plays too much into the plot beyond giving the movie some topical flavor. That’s a little interesting but ultimately this isn’t particularly elegantly made and not particularly entertaining and just generally isn’t good enough to go out of your ways to see, but it’s a nice enough try.
** out of Five

Suriname: Wan Pipel (1976)

While looking through the cinema of South America I’m going to be looking at movies from each of those small countries in the northeast of the continent which are unique for having colonial histories removed from the Iberian culture you find elsewhere on the landmass.  The first one I’ll be looking at is a film from Suriname, a nation that was colonized by the Neatherlands and thus speaks an (often nativized) version of Dutch.  The country actually has a pretty unique ethnic mix with a plurality of the population being black descendants of slaves (with that population being sub-divided into “Maroons” and “Creoles”) and a sizable percentage of the rest of the population being made up of the descendants of workers brought over from Asia, specifically India and Java.  Together these disparate people groups come together in the melting pot to form “one people,” which is what this movie’s title translates to.

For the purposes of this series I’m trying to focus on movies that are authentically the product of the countries in questions rather than movies from richer countries that are set elsewhere and one could argue that I’m already breaking that rule with this one.  The film was directed by a guy named Pim de la Parra, who was born in Suriname but appears to have been based in the Netherlands for much of his career, and while the film is primarily set in Suriname and about a Surinamese Creole man the film does appear to have been very much made with Dutch and international audiences in mind rather than Surinamese locals given that it opens with a longish text scroll briefly explaining where Suriname is what its history is.  The main character here is a guy named Roy, whose been studying in Amsterdam for several years but is called back to Suriname when he hears that his mother is on her deathbed.  He rushes there in time to be at her side before the end but once there he starts to re-consider his relationship to his home country and considers not going back.  He also starts a relationship with an Indo-Surinamese woman despite still having a Dutch girlfriend back home (played by Willeke van Ammelrooy, who’d go on to star in Antonia’s Line).

That love triangle becomes symbolic of the main character’s torn affections between the opportunities that Europe offers and the homeland he belongs in, but is maybe a little less effective when just looked at on its face as a personal story.  The film is also working with a Surinamese cast that probably consists largely of non-actors and while the film’s cinematography and direction is pretty professional and has some interesting scenery to work with there are limits to what they can do in this environment.  Ultimately the film is something of a tourist’s eye view of the country which kind of goes out of its way to do a survey of the country its set in and the various people groups involved (though it oddly seems uninterested in the divide between Maroons and Creoles, a division that would contribute to a civil war that would begin just four years later) and it’s not exactly subtle in its telling of the conflicts facing its protagonist and his torn affections as an expat and may have benefited from making him a bit more conflicted than he is for most of the movie.  Ultimately it’s a very interesting movie if you’re interested in this country (which is kind of what I’m looking for in this series) but less so if you aren’t particularly.
*** out of Five

Ecuador: Virus Tropical (2017)

While Ecuador is a bigger country than some of those little countries in the continent’s Northeast but it’s a country I tend to forget about when I think about South America.  It always just kind of seemed like Columbia’s quiet little brother.  So perhaps it’s telling that the film I picked to represent the country in my jaunt through South American cinema was a co-production with Columbia which maybe skews closer to having been produced by that larger country and is set about half-and-half between the two nations.  The film is called Virus Tropical and it is animated film for adults about the coming of age of a girl named Paola, who was born to a middle class family in Ecuador and then moved to Columbia as a teenager.  Paola is clearly a stand-in for Paola Andrea Gaviria Silguero, who works under the pen-name Power Paola, who initially told this story as a graphic novel.  This animated adaptation of that graphic novel is likely to draw immediate comparisons to the 2007 film Persepolis both in terms of style and subject matter as both are coming of age stories for teenage girls of roughly the same generation and both are meant to look like black and white comic books come to life.  The girl in Persepolis could be said to have had a more dramatic life having had to adjust to the Iranian Revolution whereas Virus Tropical is more into mundane observations of youth along the lines of something like Ladybird, though there are some interesting geographical touches like the very distant specter of the drug trade that exists in 1980s Columbia.  The animation style is kind of neat and works quite well on a design level, thought he technical execution is not seamless and there are certain effects that kind of reek of computer and stands out in kind of a bad way.  That’s a quibble though, for the most part this is a pretty good example of the female coming of age narrative and of adult animation generally and it probably deserved a slightly wider audience than it got.
***1/2 out of Five

Guyana: The Terror and the Time (1979)

Guyana is a country that is, as its former name British Guiana would imply, a nation with a British colonial history making it the only English speaking country in South America.  However, like its neighbor Suriname (which used to be connected to it) it is a country whose population is predominantly African and East Indian rather than Amerindian owing to its long history of importing slaves and later Indian indentured servants to work the country’s sugar plantations.

This long and painful history is at the heart of The Terror and the Time, a documentary about the country’s lengthy struggle for independence in various forms.  The film was made by a group called the The Victor Jara Collective which consisted of a number of radical Marxists Guyanese grad students who met in a reading group in Cornell University and proceeded to make films about their home country.  This film is said to be more specifically the work of a man named Rupert Roopnaraine, who apparently went on to be Guyana’s Minister of Education during the late 2010s, but who was very much considered an enemy of the establishment when this film was made.  The film opens and closes with quotes from Frantz Fanon, which probably gives you a good idea of its political outlook.  It’s a film about years of oppression against the population of Guyana but focuses on events in the early 1950s when they were allowed to hold local elections in a move towards self-government only to have the British disapprove of the party that won the election (why they accused of being communists) and then suspended the constitution and jail many of the rightfully elected leaders.

That’s a pretty potent example of colonial oppression and Cold War national interference but the way the film lays all this out is perhaps not as straightforward as I might have liked.  The basic facts are recounted but it also includes a bunch of montages of images set to radical poems by Martin Carter.  That’s a treatment I might have appreciated more in a documentary about well tread subject matter but this is a relatively obscure world even that maybe could have stood to have a more straightforward “just the facts” approach.  I suppose that wouldn’t have been needed on the part of Guyanese audiences, but this movie mostly wasn’t shown in Guyana… in fact it was banned there and its director was actually jailed at one point.  Because of that The Victor Jara Collective only made one more film, a thirty minute short called In the Sky’s Wild Noise, and they never made a planned second and third parts for The Terror and the Time that the film’s closing title cards announce.  As for the movie they did make, well, if you’re really into post-colonial agitprop documentaries this is plainly a good example of that, though it is probably a movie with more politics on its mind than cinema.
*** out of Five

French Guiana: Aluku Liba- Maroon Again (2009)

The decision to include Fench Guiana in my project of seeing a movie from every South American country is a bit dubious as French Guiana is not, strictly speaking, a country.  Unlike its nearby neighbors of Suriname and Guyana, French Guiana never formally broke off from France and has instead become an “Overseas Department” of that country, a status that essentially makes them as much a part of France as Hawaii is a part of the United States.  Its inhabitants have full French citizenship, travel on a French passport, vote in French elections, and the territory itself is technically part of the European Union.  Letterboxd, however, still has it as its own territory that needs to be filled in on their map (a choice they make about a lot of regions that aren’t technically countries) and as such I’m rolling with it.

I knew going into this projects that certain countries were going to have fairly slim pickings in terms of movies to choose from and this one in particular proved to be a pretty big challenge.  If Letterboxd is to be believed, the country/overseas department has only produced four feature length films of which this was the only one I could easily find streaming so I chose it even though it seemed completely obscure and had this blown up poster that gave it a whiff of amateurish.  Unfortunately that vibe I got from the poster proved prophetic, this thing barely qualifies as a professional movie.  It looks like it was shot on consumer grade cameras and was almost certainly edited on consumer grade software as it uses the same crappy digital dissolves and fades you’re likely to see when watching in the home videos you see made by your friends and family and every time text shows up on screen (which happens kind of frequently) it’s in jarring stock fonts.  The film, especially in the beginning is officially a work of fiction and follows a character named Loeti, who’s part of the “Maroon” subgroup, an ethnic group made up of former slaves who escaped Dutch plantations in Suriname and fled to the jungles and reverted to their African culture there and essentially lived an indigenous lifestyle despite not being indigenous.  Loeti had left his village and was working in an illegal gold mind but eventually needed to flee from there and found his way back to his home village.  At this point the film sort of stops bothering to play along with this being a story and just turns into an ethnographic documentary, complete with the villagers occasionally referencing the cameraman in their midst.  It eventually tries to bring the story back at the very end, but by then you’ve forgotten about it.  This isn’t some challenging mixing of documentary and fiction either, it just feels sloppy in the movie and the movie is also sloppy about giving context for all this, bafflingly choosing to wait until the very ending to provide context for everything.  I don’t want to be too harsh against the movie, which was obviously made on limited resources by someone who was more interested in just presenting this community than they were in making cinema, but I found it a bit of a chore to watch.
* out of Five

Bolivia: Blood of the Condor (1969)

It’s perhaps a little surprising that I haven’t seen a film from Bolivia before.  It’s one of the largest countries in South America in terms of size but not in terms of population or GDP, but there’s been plenty of drama there and there’s certainly a lot of photogenic scenery so you’d think there would be more of a film industry but there hasn’t been a ton.  As best as I can tell their most notable filmmaker was Jorge Sanjinés, who followed in the path of Brazil’s Cinema Novo in making some pretty radical left wing cinema about the poor and disenfranchised including Blood of the Condor, his most famous work.

The Blood of the Condor opens with an indigenous man being shot by the police but getting away and finding himself in the hospital where they say they can heal him, but only if his brother can get enough money to pay for donor blood to assist with the surgery.  At this point we watch both the brother try to find money in the present while also seeing flashbacks to what led up to the shooting.  Those flashbacks are almost certainly the most contentious and infamous element of the film.  In them we learn that he was being chased by the police for having been part of a lynch mob of sorts that went after a group of American peace corp workers which the film asserts were engaging in forced sterilizations of indigenous women as part of their health care services.  Sanjines based this accusation on some sort of rumor he heard from a friend and likely viewed the idea as some sort of larger metaphor about U.S. influence in Boliva.  I looked into this and as far as I can tell there is to date not no actual documentary evidence that such abuses occurred and frankly the allegation does not really pass the smell test: even the most racist forces in the United States are unlikely to be that interested in preserving the “racial purity” of such a remote and faraway place and certainly aren’t going to do so through an institution like the Peace Corps that essentially exists to generate good PR and increase soft power.  Audiences however took the film’s claims literally and its said that the claims made in this fictional film created an outrage so large that it convinced the government to eject the entire peace corps from Bolivia.

I generally think I have a pretty thick skin about anti-Americanism in film and art more generally, especially when the accusations being made are actually true and there was certainly no shortage of actual factual claims that could be made about American foreign policy in Latin America during this era.  Here, however, we may have found something that managed to actually offend me.  This forced sterilization accusation is just a little too ugly to just laugh off; it feels more like a blood libel than a good faith criticism.  That the film both makes this accusation and tacitly endorses vigilante violence against the “gringos” supposedly doing these things may be “punching up” but it’s bartering in the same rhetorical tools as something like The Birth of a Nation but with different people involved.  Looking beyond that the film just generally feels like some pretty blunt agitprop.  Its basic ethnographic account of the indigenous Bolivians is interesting and the present tense material with the brother searching for enough money to pay for the surgery works well enough in the tradition of exaggerated social realism.  I feel like I would be interested to see some of Sanjines’ other works as he seems to have been a pretty… intense… person who was an important voice in South American cinema but I don’t think I can get behind this one.
*1/2 out of Five

Conclusion

And that’s basically a wrap for the continent of South America.  Technically Letterboxd has the Falkland Islands and some place called South Georgia and the South Sandwich Islands as blank spaces on the map and there are some Caribbean islands that are close enough to be considered part of the continent if you want them to be but as far as the major mainland countries I’ve now seen one from each.  Overall I think I covered a pretty good mix of movies and did a pretty good job of choosing titles that had something to say about the respective countries in question and learned a whole lot about colonial legacies along the way, but the pick of the liter was probably the least political of the bunch: Virus Tropical.

Will be taking a bit of a break on this, I haven’t settled on what the next cinemap region I’ll be tackling but it will probably be some region in Africa.