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Los Conductos – Piece Together Colombian Society – Berlinale 2020

Los Conductos starts off like Robert Bresson’s A Man Escaped. A Dostoyevsky-esque man of the shadows (like the protagonist of Notes from Underground) peers out of the shadows watching the source of some footsteps nearby. He disappears and a gun appears. Shots are fired. The outcast steps out from the darkness and peers into the fresh bullet hole in his target. As the camera zooms closer to the wound, it cuts to a petrol pump being inserted into the petrol tank of a motorbike (a technique most recently used in Uncut Gems). Our shadow dweller, Pinky, reappears, robs the motorbike and escapes. It’s a minimalist opening that uses editing to generate the action and excitement without explicitly showing any violence.

The minimalist thriller opening doesn’t last as this film switches styles throughout. Here’s a quick list of all the different styles I caught in the film:

Music video: Pinky takes drugs and we get a close up of two Pinky heads bopping madly to very loud music. Reminiscent of the music and drug driven scenes in Trainspotting.
Documentary: The scenes in the print shop are static and slow, showing the workers guiding the printing machines without any narrative. Feels like Sergei Lonitza’s Factory, revealing the everyday workings of the factory.
Storytelling: A well-trimmed copy of Pinky tells his double a story about The Fallen Devil, adding mystery to the film like the storytelling of Andrea Bussmann’s Fausto and Mariano Llinas’ Extraordinary Stories.
Sketch Comedy: There’s even a scene in which Pinky and his double appear as clowns in a go-kart patrolling the streets of Bogota.

The stylistic mashup reminded me a bit of Pedro Manrique Figueroa’s collages, explored in Ospina’s A Paper Tiger, which bring together conflicting images to create political statements. In Los Conductos, the mix of styles construct Colombia as a nation built upon a mix of histories. Without a solid past, the country has no solid foundations to move forward from or even exist upon.

It isn’t helped by our single narrator, who we never feel like we can fully trust. He’s a murderer and junkie, plus he also splits into two characters at one point. Hardly elements that build a trustworthy narrator. He even looks like he’s been living in a cave for a few months, with wild unkempt hair and a long beard. But, whilst we can’t fully trust him, he’s a great candidate for narrator on the state of Colombia. Who best to comment on society, then someone who seems to exist outside of it? He’s experienced a lot and followed a range of cults and philosophies. He shows us Medellin from the street: inside the factories and vacant lots; and from above: through many shots of the city lit up from the hills he lives in.

From his perspective, we see the failures of consumer culture and capitalism in Colombia. The warehouses producing fake t-shirts to sell on the black market that Pinky works in, are ironically the only way Pinky can earn an ‘honest’ living. The mountains of garbage become Pinky’s search for treasure, a physical scar on the land courtesy of the endless waste produced by capitalism. Plus, there’s a distinct lack of care for the average worker. Pinky is forced onto the street by the factory and lives an existence as a forgotten man. This Colombia is cold and heartless.

Camilo Restrepo makes sure you feel it too by embodying a physicality into his film. The 16mm film gives the picture a graininess that you believe you could reach out and feel, whilst the close up of hands constructing, drawing, holding objects pulls you closer to the action, making it feel more tangible, like you’re controlling a character in a first person video game. You’re a part of the puzzle of Colombian society, and you, with the help of Pinky are given an opportunity to try and figure it out.

If you want to read more about Los Conductos, I strongly recommend reading Ben Flanagan’s review of the film for Vague Visages.

Life is Fare – What it Means to be an Eritrean in America

Life Is Fare Film Difficulty Ranking: 2

Life is Fare is a Tigrinya/English feature film exploring three different experiences of the Eritrean diaspora living in the U.S. It uses different styles (drama, documentary, animation, fantasy) to construct a range of views on what it means to be Eritrean and living abroad. So, if you’re looking for a unique exploration of the immigrant experience in the U.S. Life is Fare is a movie to add to your watch-list.

From: U.S/Eritrea, North America
Watch: IMDb, Watch for Free on Film's Website
Next: Farewell Amor, Burial of Kojo, The Infiltrators

Son of Monarchs – The Immigrant Experience and Lost Identity

Son of MOnarchs Film Difficulty Ranking: 3

A Mexican biologist living in New York returns to his hometown after the death of his grandmother. Unlike the urban jungle of New York, his hometown in Michoacán is surrounded by the Monarch Butterflies he studies. His isolation abroad forces him to contemplate his new identity, displayed on screen in vivid magical scenes and memories.

From: Mexico, North America
Watch: Trailer, HBO Max
Next: Lingua Franca, I'm No Longer Here, I Carry You With Me

Son of Monarchs Breakdown

Mendel is fated to test gene editing theories on Monarch butterflies. He’s both named after the father of modern genetics and hails from Angangueo, the main access point for the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Mexico. However, the coldness of his job, working in a laboratory in New York, doesn’t match the warmth of his memories growing up at home. The many shots of butterflies under the microscope being picked apart by Mendel’s scalpel removes the majesty of the butterflies and displaces Mendel from his past. At his work, the butterflies are just instruments to test the latest gene editing technology. Whereas, outside of work, they remind him of his home.

As the film progresses, Mendel seems conflicted with how he coldly pulls apart the Monarch butterflies at work. It’s implied that their beauty inspired him to become a scientist and they also appear in some of his happiest memories, as alluded to in the film’s flashbacks. Even in the narrative, he speaks of their majesty and mythology – that they are the souls of the dead returning home, and that they can even perceive mountains that have been hidden for millennia. From the way he dreams and speaks about them, he appears to revere them, instead of wanting to change them. The microscope shots of Mendel dissecting them runs against his thoughts and words.

A few times in the film, the director shoots Mendel in bed with a swarm of butterflies sitting on his body. The image emphasizes Mendel’s affinity for the Monarch butterfly. They like him, travel across imaginary borders to foreign lands before returning home. Their secrets are also hidden, just like Mendel’s buried trauma. These butterflies come to symbolize both his personal past (as the scene pops up when his traumatic nightmares surface) as well as his Mexican identity. Editing their genes perhaps symbolizes how he is also losing his own identity in New York. He’s lost touch with his family and the brother he looked up to and longs for reconnection when he returns home after his Grandmother’s death. At home, he spends his time reliving memories with his friends and family instead of speaking of his new life in New York. When the only colleague he identifies with leaves, he becomes even more lost abroad, which reflects in his attitude – ghosting his white girlfriend and showing no pride in his accomplishments. To regain his self, he has to embrace the butterfly and revere it. So he edits himself to pay respects to the animal that represents home.

Son of Monarchs is a brilliant character study of a Mexican scientist in a foreign land. Like other film’s that focus on the immigrant experience in New York – Lingua Franca, I’m No Longer Here – he doesn’t quite feel at home, and his thoughts are conveyed uniquely through his symbolic relationship with the butterfly. The only distractions are the side narratives which feel a bit empty due to the lack of exposition. These include name dropping the Trump presidency and immigrant crisis without development as well as leaving Mendel’s family relationships undercooked. The butterflies and Tenoch Huerta (who plays Mendel) are the crux of this film.

What to Watch Next

If you’re looking for more indie movies featuring the immigrant experience in New York, check out Lingua Franca and I Carry You With Me. The latter also features a lot of jumping back and forth into the memories of the main characters. There’s also I’m No Longer Here, which follows a similar Mexico-New York-Mexico arc with more of a character study like Son of Monarchs.

Or for more small town Mexico films, you could try Nudo Mixteco, an anthology film set during the Festival of San Mateo in Oaxaca, or Kings of Nowhere, a documentary that follows the last few residents of a flooded town in Northwestern Mexico.

Lastly if you want to watch more movies of protagonists identifying with animals – try Awakening of the Ants from Costa Rica or Aronofsky’s Black Swan.

Cairo Conspiracy – The Islamic State, Where Hypocrisy and Identity Collide

By Sebastian Torrelio

Adam is the son of a fisherman from Manzala. Played in a state of overwhelming control by Tawfeek Barhom, Adam is a man caught up in the enforcement of parties, privilege and power beyond his own. He studies now at Al-Azhar University in Cairo, a prestigious kingdom of knowledge disparate from his hometown. In his attempts to conform to such a foreign class, Adam will be forced to break away from where he comes from, where he fits in, and what he is.

Barhom conceives Adam with a drowned-out regularity – the world spinning in front of his glazed look, eyes sunken into his rapidly outpaced mind, initially unclear whether this same mind can handle what director Talik Saleh presents as a complex relationship with his father and loved ones. Slowly, a more mysterious mind unravels itself. Adam becomes integral in the election of the University’s Grand Imam, a powerful religious position, that prompts the region’s officials to scrape together what unruly coup-like plots they can muster.

Two key aspects of Cairo Conspiracy lend it strength where the common eye doesn’t see: Roger Rosenberg’s production design examines a colorful swath of royal colors and ambers that take the film out of time, a growing modernity only revealing itself once outside the religious confines of Al-Azhar; and Theis Schmidt’s editing, a frenetic cut that often deletes the bookending pause of a common conversation, depositing the audience mid-instruction. Both lend Saleh the ability to curve his story away from an objective viewpoint, each religious and political sentiment a targeted draw within the limits of only what we’ve been allowed to behold.

The evolution of Adam’s character lends Cairo Conspiracy its most comprehensive themes, circling around the identity of oneself within the ever-splitting world we spend our educational years breaching toward. Though Saleh, no stranger to conspiratorial plotlines and investigative contention, allows hyperbole to sink into his resolutions, his lead’s transformation is deftly carried on bended shoulders by Barhom. A wisdom and judgment fills his intent and mind through the ongoing recourse, filling the gaps with the same likened modernity.

Where identity favors not oneself, outside eyes strengthen their stance. For Adam is often just a fisherman himself – or the son of a fisherman, depending on who you ask. In the face of God, over country, the distinction may finally grow some significance.

Seen at Laemmle Glendale