From Bolivia to Paraguay, the best of Latin American cinema

By Julio Feo Zarandieta

RIO DE JANEIRO, BRAZIL – In this chronicle, I tell you about the two films that I liked the most in the official feature film competition of the 2022nd Toulouse Latin American Film Festival, and that I highly recommend from a selection of twelve feature films, including five firsts.

UTAMA: A BOLIVIAN PEARL BY ALEJANDRO LOAYZA

With awards at the 39th edition of Films in Progress (Toulouse/Lima) in 2021 and at Sundance 2022, the film has given an excellent calling card and confirmed its reputation. “Utama” (Our Homeland), which carries the French title “The Forgotten Land,” is a brilliant Bolivian-Uruguayan co-production and the first feature-length film by Bolivian director Alejandro Loayza Grisi.

Alongside Kiro Russo’s “The Great Movement” (2021), which screened in Venice, we now see Alejandro Loayza’s “Utama”, a promising rebirth of Bolivian cinema, which is still sparse, with young filmmakers who bring a clear cinematographic quality and a social concern beyond pure commercial cinema.

“Utama” captivates us from the first frames with its careful camerawork, sober depiction of intimate interiors and magnificent Cinemascope panoramas of the arid landscapes of the Bolivian altiplano. This is a first feature film, although reflection, maturity and experience are evident from these images.

Reading the biographical data of Alejandro Loayza, I learn that he is the son of the Bolivian director Marcos Loayza and that he trained first as a photographer and then as a cinematographer in the world of cinema. So I can better understand the obvious quality of this debut film, whose script also has the good sense to combine a sensitive and moving human fiction with an almost documentary or ethnographic tone.

An eighty-year-old Quechua farming couple, Virginio and Sisa, live in the Bolivian altiplano, tending a herd of llamas in this desert region badly affected by drought and water shortages. The locals have migrated to the city, and those left behind live in a harsh and miserable reality far from modern progress.

The community gathers and debates whether it is necessary to emigrate, but the elders do not want to abandon the “Pachamama” and hold on to the traditions of their ancestors. In this context, we witness the daily life of Virginio and Sisa and the arrival of their grandson Clever, who tries to convince his grandparents to go with him to the city.

Virginio hides a serious illness from his wife, but Clever’s arrival provokes conflict and highlights the contradiction between urban “progress” and living in contact with nature. While the grandparents continue to speak Quechua, Clever speaks Spanish and does not understand Quechua, underscoring the double generational and social rift within the family.

The boy wants to bring them to the city so they can live better, but Sisa and Virginio do not want to leave their home and their herd of llamas. When living in contact with nature is threatened by the lack of water, the supposed urban progress presents them with a difficult dilemma.

With little dialogue and brilliant staging, “Utama” tells of this conflict primarily through the images, the looks and faces of the characters.

The elderly couple, who of course have an obvious complicity, are not professional actors and are played by José Calcina and Luisa Quispe, who have been married for 48 years. Their wrinkles and their looks tell us as much as the dialogues in which they express their feelings, their joy and their pain.

Virginio, who feels very ill, says nothing to his wife, but explains to his grandson the terrible legend of the death of the condor. A sacred animal in Bolivia, when it feels at the end of its life, flies to a mountain top to drop down and die. The dialogue between grandfather and grandson about death and illness is brilliant and universally readable.

“Isn’t the condor afraid?” asks Clever. The old man, coughing heavily, pauses and replies, “Yes, he is afraid, but a new cycle is beginning…”.

The ancestral rituals and the acceptance of death as something natural are accompanied by music, by songs in Quechua and Spanish, and by images of these arid landscapes that make us think of the merciless humanity of a great Sam Peckinpah western.

On the subject of water as a common good, both in Bolivia and in the rest of the world, without direct reference and in a completely different genre, I recommend the excellent film by Iciar Bollain “También la lluvia” (2010), filmed in Bolivia, which fictionalizes the story of the Bolivians’ revolution against the multinationals that wanted to privatize the water.

EAMI: BRILLIANT PARAGUAYAN CINEMA BY PAZ ENCINA

“Eami” is the third film by Paraguayan filmmaker Paz Encina, who became known in 2006 with “Hamaca Paraguaya,” winner of the Fipresci Prize at the Cannes Film Festival. The work, surprising for its long and poetic sequences of images, tells the story of the long wait of an elderly couple whose son was mobilized during the Chaco War (1932/1935).

“Hamaca Paraguaya” was the first film shot entirely in the Guarani language in er country. Guarani and Spanish are the two official languages in Paraguay.

Paz Encina, an artist and filmmaker with a musical background, says she has always sought an artistic approach to the image through sound and music. Her work on the soundtrack always precedes the actual filming, as in her second film “Ejercicios de memoria” (2016), which recalls the crimes and tortures during the long years of Alfredo Stroessner’s dictatorship.

With her third and last film “Eami”, the memory of the bush, Paz Encina continues her artistic conception of sound and cinematographic image, of poetic abstraction and realism. Her sound scripts, which she elaborates on her locations, always precede the images, whose staging and editing are meant to illustrate the story.

In her films, which deserve to be studied in film schools, the key question is clearly posed: How long should a shot last, as Godard asked himself. In Paz Encina’s coherent ethics and aesthetics, the answer is clear: the decisive factor is the rhythm and duration of the sound or musical phrase.

In the case of “Eami,” the idea for the film came from an encounter between the filmmaker and the young Ayoreo chief Taguide Picanerai, who accompanied her in Paris in 2018 for the presentation of “Nous les arbres,” a performance or sound art installation that illustrates these lush Paraguayan forests in danger of extinction.

The Ayoreos are an ethnic community of the Gran Chaco. Many of them were forced out of the forest in the 1970s, but the Ayoreo-Totobiegosode are the only uncontacted community to survive in the Amazon basin, living off agriculture and hunting.

The Gran Chaco, which straddles Paraguay, Bolivia and Argentina, was the site of the war between Paraguay and Bolivia in the 1930s and, like the Amazon rainforest, is a victim of deforestation by intensive agribusiness and food industries.

“Eami” is a poetic chronicle of this announced ecological and human genocide, a journey through sound and image into the Paraguayan jungle where an indigenous boy, the incarnation of the bird god, is in search of his people, who have been dispersed and enslaved by Mennonite settlers of Swiss origin.

In the film, these settlers, the genocidal ancestors of the dictator Stroessner, are personified by a blonde woman whom we see working at home while her henchmen chase the natives into the forest (the Mennonites are a religious community also based in Mexico and mentioned in Carlos Reygadas’ film “Silent Light”).

The fragility of this endangered nature in Paraguay is summarized in a long close-up of four eggs, while the wind blows, branches rustle, insects hiss and numerous animal sounds can be heard. The restful sounds of nature mingle with the sounds of men shouting while dogs bark and naked natives chase.

The engine sounds of the machines, the crackling of the fire, the wind or the rain cover the voices of the natives who tell how they were driven out of the forest by these thugs armed with guns and sticks. In the Ayorean language and in Quechua, Paz Encina invites us on this imaginary and poetic journey through the Paraguayan jungle, as if sending an SOS to planet Earth against this savage destruction.

“Utama” and “Eami”, two good candidates for the palmarés of this 34th edition of Cine Latino.