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.

A Quitely Powerful Truth

One can almost hear silent and off-camera documentarian Emmanuel Vaughan-Lee asking his interviewees, "How is climate change affecting you?"

His appropriately titled Isle de Jean Charles, featured in SIFF's "Ripped from the Headlines" package, asks just that question of the denizens of the titular island, deep in the Louisiana bayou.

http://goprojectfilms.com/#isle-de-jean-charles

His interviewees describe what it's like to live in a changing climate without ever saying the words "climate change." Instead, the phenomenon is implied and only its adverse effect is made explicit. Even better, Isle de Jean Charles is a platform for the people who know the island best tell its story themselves in their own words. In a way that places blame nowhere and retains focus on the islanders, we learn how they will soon be displaced by climate change.

Vaughan-Lee's silent question is important for its silence. Instead of creating an expose like An Inconvenient Truth, Vaughan-Lee is able to simultaneously side-step a hot-button political issue and address it dead on. By humanizing a politicized event, he is able to appeal to our senses of empathy and compassion, rather than to our senses of rage and righteous indignation. Isle de Jean Charles is quietly powerful.

Being Black "After Trayvon"

Do young African-American men feel persecuted? Do you really need to ask?

Alex Mallis' short film After Trayvon, featured in SIFF's "Ripped from the Headlines" package, sure feels the need to answer. (The answer, by the way, is "yes.")

 

Unfortunately, a video that lays it out as bluntly as After Trayvon is needed, because too many white Americans are blinded by the safety lent them by their skin color to the reality that not everyone has it so good. While Mallis' format may be prosaic, it's to be commended for it's simplicity: it's hard (or at least asinine) to answer "I feel persecuted" with "no you don't."

It ought to be a no-brainer, but apparently it isn't, that young men with brown or black skin feel persecuted in America because they are persecuted in America. It's important, therefore, for material like After Trayvon to exist. Mallis may not be a sophisticated filmmaker, but he gets the job done.

Philip Knowlton and Narrative Over Planting

Giving story precedence over style goes a long way. In fact, a sloppy approach to story can ruin an otherwise promising movie.

Take Philip Knowlton's Flower Shop and included in SIFF's "Face the Music" package. It's a short documentary that squeezes in two related but separate stories, and tries to cover the bad dramaturgy with cloying editing.

The film spends about the first half describing the history of Carolina Florist, the "oldest African-American flower shop in NYC." References to Phil Young's halting drum career punctuate that history. Through use of titles, we're guided through that history and into Young's resurrected devotion to music-making, illustrated by slow motion shots of Young relishing in his art. He describes how kids in Harlem are denied music and art in school, and how he and his band realized that they had "something to give to the kids."

Knowlton has a lot things going on in his film that, if he focused upon them instead of upon his fetish for slow motion, would make for a compelling movie. He could have focused on the flower shop's rise and fall, or he could have told the story of bringing jazz to the kids. Instead, he crams both into a short documentary. As if that weren't bad enough, he wastes precious time with his cloying slow motion shots of Phil Young drumming. His videography gets in the way of his storytelling.

Documentaries are meant to tell a story, not to exhibit the editor's filmic flourishes. In the end, Flower Shop is a messy example of style taking primacy over story. Knowlton may know his way around editing software, but he knows next to nothing about making a movie.

Focus on the Work, Owerko

The Boombox Project is a bad commercial for Lyle Owerko's exhibition book of the same name.

The Boombox Project, directed by Paul Stone and featured in SIFF's "Face the Music" package, tells a flimsy story that focuses more upon an apparently self-involved artist than upon the product it seeks to sell.

The film begins with an expository focus on Owerko and how he began taking pictures while vacationing in Holland, and how he fancies himself a "creative anthropologist." He alludes to the boombox's position as a cultural icon for youth of the '80s and '90s, before briefly describing how he photographed and exhibited them and lets us know there's a book we can buy.

The film's intent is to sell us on his product, but the execution doesn't deliver. The focus seems to be on Owerko as opposed to his exhibition book, and he is a less than compelling protagonist. A Dutch vacation and professionally identifying by a self-invented term make Owerko seem overly privileged and unrelatable. The effect is not only alienation from the artist, but from the art that he's selling.

If the intent of The Boombox Project is to sell the audience on Owerko's exhibition book, it does a poor job. By focusing on uninteresting aspects of Owerko instead of upon the exhibition itself, the film makes us wonder why we should even care.