August 17-23: SanFic

Word of the Day:
largometraje-feature film (literally translates to something like "long measurement")

Last week/this weekend was the Santiago International Film Festival, known by its adorable-sounding-in-a-spanish accent acronym, SanFic. Featuring independent films of all genres from 30 countries, including Chile, in cinemas around the city, SanFic is a pretty good representation of the robust arts scene in Santiago. Since I will probably never be able to go to see independent film again for $2, I hit up 3 films, all incredibly different but wonderful.

The first film I saw, "Alamar"(To the Sea), was produced and directed by a Mexican team. The director was there for the screening and took questions which was awesome. Blending the documentary genre with fiction, it told the story of a young boy of half Italian- half Mayan heritage named Natan who is spending some of his last moments with his father, Jorge, before he goes to Italy to live with his mother permanently. They spend this time fishing in an area known as Banco Chinchorro, off Mexico's Caribbean coast, which ensured some of the most exquisite cinemotography I have seen in a long time.
The film also included other memorable characters such as Jorge's grandfather Nestor, who spoke his own comically unintelligible dialect of Spanish and Blanquita, a cattle egret, a bird "from another world," who I felt was a perfect metaphor for Natan himself. According to the film maker, the bird appeared in the film on pure chance, but ended up shaping its direction significantly. All in all, it was a delightful film about identity and our relationship with nature.

The second film I saw, "The Sentimental Engine Slayer" was a project of the Mars Volta guitarist, Omar Rodriguez Lopez, was quite trippy although not without its entertaining moments as well (Apparently, between a bit of time in Guatemala and adapting over things from Chile, I can understand dirty Mexican slang pretty decently.) Telling the story of the distopic life of Barlam, a teen in a seedy El Paso setting, the film presented so many alternate story lines that it was impossible to tell if all, none or parts of it represented his reality. Like a lot of the Mars Volta's music, it featured these scenes that played around with language- switching between English and Spanish, and featuring poetry like voiceovers where words were used in ways that seemed familiar but actually didn't have conventional meanings. Oddly enough, given that it was fairly disturbing, the film left me with a weird nostalgia for Texas, even though I've never been there, if you discount some time in the Houston Airport.

And lastly, I saw a documentary entitled "La tierra se quedó" (The Land Left Behind) which examined the problem of displacement during conflict in the Colombian countryside. Touchingly and humanly, through the stories of 3 individuals and their families, it illustrated a paradox I studied a lot last semester in my "Political Violence" seminar- where people in conflict zones are trapped between rebel forces and their opposition and cannot remain both neutral and safe. Threatened by both FARC rebels and paramilitaries, families were left with no choice but to flee, often more than once, as was the sad case for several families in the film. Their struggles with government bureaucracy, allegations of corruption, indigenous identity politics, rural and urban divides and childhood were also examined.

If only this went on every weekend...