A Perfect Pairing: "Los Olvidados" and "Marmato, Colombia"

Ramiro Gomez's art, however important, is impermanent. That makes David Feldman's documentary Los Olvidados a crucial supplement to Gomez's practice.

Gomez creates cardboard cut-out pop-up art meant to draw attention the humanity of immigrant laborers in the Southwest. The film documents the creation of an installation that Gomez erected in the Sonora desert of Arizona depicting a family of immigrants gathered around a white cross.

 

Feldman's documentary begins with a description of Gomez's art: he creates cardboard cut-outs of immigrant labors doing the kind of labor that immigrants often do. He then places them in found locations where someone might do the kind of work depicted by the cut-out. For example, he might put a cut-out gardener in a Beverly Hills lawn. Cardboard is an important ingredient in his art: it represents how immigrant laborers are often treated as disposable. This lays the groundwork for his installation titled Los Olvidados, or The Forgotten. Instead of an urban environment, Los Olvidados was placed in the Sonora desert, a high traffic area for illegal immigration up from Mexico and infamous as a deadly crossing. The piece depicts a Latino family standing around a small white cross.

By depicting immigrants in a compassionate light that calls attention to their vulnerability, Gomez puts a human face on a highly politicized and de-humanized event. His installations presumably exist until a property owner has their help clean it off their lawn, or in the case of the Sonora installation, until natural forces deteriorate the cardboard. Their impermanence is one of their strengths, but also one of their weaknesses. Feldman's film quite successfully addresses the problems of the installations' impermanence while not detracting from the story that their disposability tells.

 

David Feldman's Los Olvidados shouldn't be taken as a stand-alone film, but rather as an interpretive supplement to Ramiro Gomez's installation art. Gomez's installations are important in their humanization of a group that often takes second place to people's political beliefs about them. Feldman's film partakes of that importance.

 

Marmato, Colombia perfectly compliments Los Olvidados by placing responsibility for the root causes of Latino immigration to the States in the hands of North American capitalists and their Latino government partners.

Featured second in SIFF's "Ripped from the Headlines" package after Los Olvidados, Santiago Ramirez's Marmato is a series of interviews with the denizens of a Colombian mining community who are allegedly being displaced by an unholy alliance between a Canadian multinational and the Colombian government.

Marmato, Colombia consists of interviews with Marmato's residents, who practice traditional mining that ekes just enough mineral from the earth to make a living without depleting their primary source of income any time in the near future. According to the interviewees, their national government struck a deal with an unnamed Canadian multinational mining operation that is quickly depleting their mines and not paying the Marmatans for their labor. The government allegedly took it one step further and illegalized traditional hand-mining. As one of the interviewees puts it, by taking away their primary source of income, the Colombian government and the multinational are turning "good people bad, and bad ones rich."

Ramirez has struck a vein with his interviews with the locals affected by their conflict with the national government and the government's capitalist partners. It's worth noting, however, that he doesn't reach anything close to journalistic objectivity by including interviews with the leading figures in the multinational or government. By doing so he could flesh out the situation that is displacing the people of Marmato. Still, the interviews with Marmato's residents suffices in creating a companion piece to Los Olvidados by describing how actions taken by North American capitalists can create the conditions that displace Latin Americans from their homes, setting them, perhaps, on the road for America.

SIFF's curation is exquisite in placing Marmato, Colombia after Los Olvidados. It expands upon the story that Ramiro Gomez tells with his cardboard cut-outs by providing a platform for Colombians still in Colombia to say why they need to leave their homes. SIFF ought to be commended for their dramaturgical approach to telling one story with two films.