La Gualdra 529 / Cinema / Cannes Film Festival 2022
The issue of violence by adolescents has been addressed by several recent films in Latin America. we remember The Savages, the Argentine Alejandro Fadel (2012); or more recently the Colombian monkeys, by Alejandro Landes (2019), and his will to break with the coordinates of social realism. To do this, they set their films in natural landscapes magnified by the staging (desert in the Argentine case, jungle in the Colombian case).
The immersion of young people in a hostile natural environment makes it possible to question moral principles and adopt a perspective that flirts with the parable, capable of explaining the exacerbation of violence in characters who have barely entered adolescence. The natural landscape functions as a world of drives, a setting in which the characters, breaking their ties with civilization, reveal another hidden part of what is human.
An unusual therapy
the colombian movie The packmade by Andrés Ramírez Pulido, winner in The Week of Critique, proposes apparently similar coordinates. The first sequences, located in an indeterminate urban context, present Eliú and the Bow, two young teenagers, before they commit a crime that will land them in jail. Affected by the consumption of alcohol and drugs, the two characters, who intended to kill Eliú’s father, make the wrong victim.
After spending some time apart, Eliú and monkey They meet again in an experimental rehabilitation center for young offenders, located in the middle of the jungle. The detainees are in charge of restoring an old mansion invaded by vegetation, at the same time that they practice a series of rituals that try to redirect them morally.
The ceremonies performed by the head of the camp, whom the inmates call leader, are situated between religious rites and magical ceremonies induced by the telluric power of the exuberant nature that surrounds them. The music, at this time, like the lighting, based on a chiaroscuro with a clear symbolic vocation, underlines this spiritual dimension.
Religious symbolism builds bridges with common places of psychoanalysis, crystallized in the figure of the father. So it is with the inexplicable disappearance of the victim’s body, a man named The invisible, who one day abandoned the dissolute life to start an ascetic retreat. But also considering the father as the embodiment of evil, which one must get rid of in order to free oneself.
The film achieves its best moments with the portrait of young people, who in this natural environment, invaded by ruins, express a certain inner peace, and in which nature offers a consoling refuge. However, the overly repetitive question of guilt associated with the figure of the father -despite a political reading by which today’s violence is the inevitable legacy of that committed by the previous generation- does not fully achieve its objective: to detach of a certain realism in search of the symbolic, as in the sequence in which the person in charge of the project reveals the true objective of the rehabilitation program.
Interview with Andres Ramirez Pulido
Sergio Ramos: Why is it necessary to talk again and again about violence and the attempt to break with it?
Andres Ramirez Pulido: I didn’t want to anchor my film in a specific event or context like the Colombian one, although we have a long history with violence, that’s why I chose fiction. But violence permeates our society, our culture and human nature, obviously. I imagined this prison in which young people would have therapeutic accompaniment. It is a place that does not exist in Colombia, but my encounters with young prisoners, for their addictions or crimes, have served as the basis for creating this pure fiction.
MR: One of the merits is that you avoid falling into the stereotype of the delinquent.
ARP: When I wrote the film I had the most common imagery about these young people. But with the preparatory work, I met Eliún, a young man who has implicit violence in him, I began to search, to go to the unsafe, both in the casting and in the writing of the script. I wanted to get out of the Latin American social cinema that is currently being made.
MR: We are talking about the formal treatment of the film, in particular the way you have filmed nature.
ARP: We had already started this work in my previous short films, with my partner Joana, who is a production assistant and plastic artist. She leads me to think about the texture, the humidity and we wanted to make a film that could be smelled, felt, that the viewer felt immersed, it is something very elaborate. We wanted the hacienda, for example, which belonged to a drug trafficker, to become one more character. With Joana and the director of photography we worked in three bands.
MR: In your film, a corpse disappears in the middle of a light. Do you think it’s appropriate to talk about magical realism?
ARP: It is the latest idea in the script and represents my way of thinking about the world, my faith. I am a believer, I believe that there is something more than material, how to get a boy out of this spiral of violence? It is impossible not to repeat history, hatred and revenge. I believe that he is not in ourselves, it is something that is not chosen, a touch of grace comes to us to find salvation from him.
MR: How to relate this saving spirituality with the therapies practiced by the group?
ARP: The therapy part is a mix that came up in my head, among several things: religion, energy… and it is based on communities that help teenagers to get out of drug addiction. The actor who plays Godoy intervenes in one of those communities, and the kids love him.
The movie The packby Andrés Ramírez Pulido, was the winner of the Grand Prize in Critics’ Week, at the 2022 Cannes Film Festival.