2019 Top Ten List #8 Our Mothers (Nuestras madres)

OUR MOTHERS (Nuestras madres)      A-              

Guatemala  Belgium  France   (77 mi)  2019  d: César Díaz  

This film has the distinction of being the first Guatemalan film to ever screen at the Cannes Film festival, winning the Camera d’Or as best first feature, while also picking up a screenplay award in the Critics’ Week section, and while what’s presented is fictionalized, it reveals the painful cost of the nation’s own history, uncovering the trauma left behind from the 36-year Guatemalan Civil War, which largely targeted and massacred the indigenous Mayan population.  While the film doesn’t get into the origins of that war, much of the blame can be traced to the United States, as this was the site of one of the first black operations by the CIA in 1954, which feared a communist expansion that might affect their United Fruit Company banana trade (thus the term banana republics) which they operated since the turn of the century without compensation to the country, building rail and electricity lines to export the goods out of the country, selling primarily in America and Europe.  What they found instead was a Revolutionary Action party that won 85% of the vote implementing land reforms, minimum wage laws, increased educational funding and near universal voting rights (illiterate women were still excluded), while also asking for compensation for everything foreign interests had seized.  Despite these rather modest gains, the United States viewed this as a threat, with the CIA installing a right-wing Guatemalan General in a coup d’état, quickly overturning decades of social and economic reforms, banning labor unions and left-wing political parties, essentially disenfranchising the 85% majority of left-wing Guatemalans, returning all the confiscated land to the United Fruit Company.  A series of fraudulent elections followed where only military personnel were allowable candidates, where a US-backed dictatorship initiated a ruthless hate campaign targeting Guatemala’s indigenous population, which was more than half the population, but they owned no land, as it had been confiscated in the late 19th century by Guatemala President Justo Rufino Barrios and distributed amongst the military officers, a practice that continued well into 1960 when an unsuccessful revolt was led by left-wing junior military officers, who fled to the mountains and eventually aligned with Fidel Castro’s Cuban revolution.  The CIA responded by bombing rebel bases and using Guatemala as a training grounds for the failed Bay of Pigs invasion of Cuba.  When left-wing guerilla forces attacked the offices of the United Fruit Company, provoking sympathy worker strikes and student walkouts, the government crackdown initiated what turned out to be a long and protracted civil war that only ended in 1996 with the help of a United Nations intervention.  Now widely regarded as an unjust war, founded on genocide and greed, fueled by a racist antagonism towards indigenous peoples, some 200,000 lives were lost with an additional 45,000 still missing, yet this genocide was largely underreported, as 83% of those killed were indigenous Mayan Indians. 

Even after all these years, Guatemala is still coming to terms with their own nation’s history, establishing truth and reconciliation committees to uncover the truth about what happened, as was similarly shown in Abderrahmane Sissako’s film BAMAKO (2006) taking place in Mali’s capital city of Bamako, putting war criminals on trial, publicly recording and documenting all eye witness testimony, which largely consists of surviving widows of the dead, most of whom were themselves arrested and repeatedly tortured and raped by the government’s military forces.  This film honors and pays tribute to those women, even as they are digging up the bones of their family remains in unmarked mass grave sites littered across the country.  Ernesto, Armando Espitia from Amat Escalante’s Heli (2013), is a forensic anthropologist assigned to one of the mass grave sites, where he along with others perform the painstakingly slow task of excavating the dead bodies, identifying and then carefully reconstructing the bones while informing the families.  At the same time, they are recording new eye witness testimony, so it’s a multi-faceted process all conducted by a small group of scientists working for the Forensic Foundation.  Ernesto is moved by the testimony of an elderly indigenous woman named Nicolasa (Aurelia Caal) whose husband was tortured and killed for offering food to rebel soldiers, leading to yet another unmarked mass grave site, but what she also provides is a photograph of a rebel leader that closely resembles his missing father.  Startled by this revelation, he immediately drops what he’s doing and makes an unauthorized visit to the gravesite, only to be stymied because it happens to be on private land.  Without a warrant, he has no right to start digging on someone else’s property.  Irritated at this setback, he runs into trouble with his boss, as the reputation of the company could have been compromised by his reckless behavior.  Yet this slight crack reveals an opening into his past, which he seems driven to learn more about, while his mother (Emma Dib), seems less inclined to reopen old wounds.  The use of two Mexican actors may be viewed as troubling to some, as their Spanish dialect is not the same as how Guatemalans speak, challenging the prevailing authenticity of the film, yet so few people around the world would actually notice the difference.  Still, those in Guatemala can tell, a nation without a burgeoning movie industry to pull actors from, relying instead largely on non-professionals, including the indigenous women portrayed in the film who are actually revealing the stories of their lives, giving the film a uniquely compelling interest and the intimacy needed to make it feel true.

Nuanced and humane, the film’s strength lies in its ability to capture the shared trauma of how survivors and later generations deal with the aftermath of war.  In this case, with so many husbands and fathers dead or missing, it is the women who are left to carry this burden.  The film alternates between an examination of Nicolasa’s village and Ernesto’s own family, each with their own startling revelations, yet it is the women who are ultimately entrusted to tell their stories, which serves as a healing process for a nation’s collective trauma.  In Nicolasa’s village, for instance, all the women were victims of rape, genocide, and an unfathomable violence that no one wanted to hear literally for decades.  As survivors, they are the keepers of history, bearing witness to events that have been forgotten by time.  But as indigenous women, their own cultural history has also been ignored by the rest of the world.  This film eloquently gives these women a voice, and an elevated cultural significance, dressed in their finest, where the colorful hand-stitched traditional clothing, hats, and hairstyles are a remarkable visual presence and a stark contrast to the morbid imagery associated with gravesites.  Yet this excavation activity all takes place under their watchful eyes, silent and solemn, but bearing witness.  This film also raises another interesting question, unforeseen and rarely discussed, and that is the generation of children born out of these systematic rapes, none knowing their own fathers, many led to believe fictitious tales to protect them from the truth, yet they are a central part of this story, a product of genocide.  While not easy to talk about, this public, post-war airing may open doors and help clear the air for many of them who have been living with these dark secrets for years.  It’s a hard concept to grasp, and even more difficult to personalize, yet this film offers solace and respect.  Another important consideration is that these woman, through the art of film, had to re-live the horrors of their lives, and do so while facing a camera, which is foreign to indigenous culture.  Yet perhaps the moment of the film is when a succession of indigenous women stare silently into the camera, one after the other, each given the dignity they finally deserve.  If we learn anything from this film it is to respect the voices of the survivors, as they will forever be haunted by both the living and the dead.  In the end there is no justice, no compensation, nothing that can justify how brutally these women were violated and what was murderously taken away from them.  All these women were betrayed by their own government, yet to them this comes as no surprise, as they’ve lived with that all their lives and throughout their own history. 

Manakamana

MANAKAMANA           B                

Nepal  USA  (118 mi)  2013  d:  Pacho Velez and Stephanie Spray      Official site

Along with SWEETGRASS (2009), LEVIATHAN (2012), and The Iron Ministry (2104), this is another film to come out of the Sensory Ethnography Lab :: Harvard University (SEL), a unique collaboration between the Department of Anthropology and the Department of Visual & Environmental Studies programs established in 2006, which is distinct from other graduate visual anthropology programs in the United States in that it promotes experimentation with culturally inflected, nonfiction film.  The Lab is comprised of graduate students mostly making films that are not for exhibition, but are seen only among themselves, but a surprising number of acclaimed documentaries have come out of the Lab.  The subjects can be traced back to the works of Robert J. Flaherty, considered the forefather of ethnographic film, the maker of the first feature length documentary film, NANOOK OF THE NORTH (1922), which was an attempt to realistically portray Inuit people in northern Canada, though it required quite a bit of staging before the camera.  The same could be said for these films, which lend themselves to stark realism, shot in real time, using raw footage, unedited and unadorned, using no explanatory talking heads, where the films aren’t meant to explain what we’re seeing, but to simply take the viewer into a mysterious world where they’ve likely never been and allow them to fully experience what it’s like.  To this end, like Flaherty, they succeed brilliantly, as they are a time capsule documentation of an existing reality in some faraway small corner of the globe.  This notion of capturing reality has haunted filmmakers from the beginning, where according to French film critic, film theorist, and longtime editor of Cahiers du Cinéma, André Bazin, each era looks for its own realism, its own technique and aesthetic which can best capture it, where there may be numerous realisms, but there is also past realities, present realities and future realities — all of which cinema creates or mediates and explores continuously, while another Cahiers editor, Jean-Louis Comolli, offers his own views:  

The basic deception of direct cinema is really its claim to transcribe truly the truth of life, to begin the position of witness in relation to that truth so that the film simply records objects and events mechanically.  In reality the very fact of filming is of course already a productive intervention which modifies and transforms the material recorded.  From the moment the camera intervenes a form of manipulation begins.

While these documentary films offer the appearance of truth, the ultimate question is always finding the best way to achieve it.  Once more, Bazin claims in his book What is Cinema? - Volume 2 - Page 26 - Google Books Result that realism in art can only be achieved in one way — through artifice — that every form of aesthetic must necessarily choose between what is worth preserving and what should be discarded, and what should not even be considered.  MANAKAMANA is set in Chitwan, Nepal, where the filmmakers set up a Super 16mm camera in a fixed position inside a gondola lift cable car that takes passengers up to and from the Manakamana Temple, with the filmmakers themselves riding in the same cars recording the various passages in real time, relying upon a strict formal precision of a series of unbroken shots, in this case 11 shots, each about 10-minutes in length, each trip containing a different group of passengers.  The trips alternate between ascents and descents, with blackout periods where the car goes through a turnaround at each of the terminal points, allowing for an undetected editing process, creating the illusion that the whole film was done in a single take.  Curiously, in a discussion with the filmmakers afterwards, we learn that there were 35 shots in all, that the original cut was 3 and a half to 4 hours, eventually edited down to 11 shots.  People in the film were not chosen at random, as one might presume, but were selected ahead of time and rehearsed by the directors and their team so they’d feel comfortable in front of a large and cumbersome 16 mm camera staring at them for the duration.  So exactly like Flaherty, there was a certain amount of staging incorporated into the realist aesthetic, though the extreme minimalistic approach makes it appear completely naturalistic.  As the film does not provide any narration, there is no history provided of how the cable system was installed, as previously the only way to reach the 17th century Manakamana temple, the sacred place of the Hindu Goddess Bhagwati (who has the ability to grant pilgrim’s wishes), was by walking uphill for over three hours.  The modernistic cable car system of 31 passenger cars and 3 cargo cars was imported from Austria in 1998 and incorporates its own generators and hydraulic emergency drive in the case of a power failure.

What sustains our interest is the unique characteristics of each passenger, most of whom are from the Nepal region, offering a cross-section of people who would come to visit the temple, some of whom sit in complete silence, their attention drifting off into the mountainside below, while others may hold continuous conversations throughout, many dressed in hats and colorful attire, some bringing a variety of objects with them, including musical instruments or animals.  The film opens in complete darkness, where only the mechanical sounds, mixed with the noise of people stirring about, can be heard, as movement can be detected by signs of light until there’s an abrupt lift into the sky, offering a rare vantage point of the lush green foliage below, where there’s a sign of dirt roads and smaller trails carved out in the mountainsides, clusters of houses clinging to hillsides, and terraced farming on the foothills of the Himalayas.  The sky is everpresent, where one can see the lines the cable cars travel upon strung out into the distant horizon, often seeing many cars coming in the opposite direction, where it’s a quiet ride, like floating on air, until they hit one of the stabilizing towers, which makes a jarring noise.  The ride uphill is slower, requires more power, and takes a bit longer, while the descent is quicker, though during the filming one often can’t tell if they’re moving up or down, where we’re lost in an optical illusion.  Of note, we never actually see the temple, the object of the passengers’ destination, but are instead stuck in a series of continually linked sequences that automatically recycles before the next journey begins. 

Anyone who has ridden in a similar contraption realizes that initially there is an element of fear, where it takes awhile to feel safe while hoisted up into the air like this, as there is no way out until you reach the final destination, where the initial passengers of an elderly man and a young child sit in silence, where no one speaks at all in the opening twenty minutes.  But people carry offerings, like flowers in a basket, or a live rooster, while three Asian metal rockers bring a weeks-old kitten with them that keeps wailing throughout while they humorously take a series of selfies, talking excitedly about making a music video here before complaining that there’s no a/c.  In another instant we’re in the presence of several bleating goats in a cart, where initially it appears they could anxiously leap out of the car in a panic until we see they’re all tied together.  Midway through is a shot in total darkness, where all you hear are the screeching mechanical noises associated with turning the car around, where the stereo sound design has front and back speakers that add to the sensuousness of the moment.  Two women attempting to eat ice cream bars turns into a comedy of errors as one has it smudged all over her face while the other simply can’t stop the constant dripping all over herself, while afterwards two seasoned musicians heading for the temple tune and play their stringed sarangis.  One of them recalls hiking up the mountain in earlier times.  While one never knows what to expect and there is an element of anticipation waiting to see who or what comes next, there’s some question whether this is enough, as this remains a smaller film about subtle distinctions where some viewers may feel trapped seeking cultural insights through such a self-contained, claustrophobic environment, where it remains an open question whether any liberating or transcendent moments are achieved in this manner.