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The true life of festivals, especially the one in Malaga, sometimes is all that happens while the official section makes its plans, its photos and its walks on the red carpet. In the documentary section, for example and for now, in just three days something very similar to a miracle has already been witnessed:
'On the other side',
by Colombian Iván Guarnizo, is its title. And not far from him, less ambitious perhaps but in the same register as close to the search as to the wound of time, '
Fantasia
', by Aitor Merino.
Both are born from the impulse to know and get to know each other, both are ambitious for their own perplexity
and both end up becoming a self-portrait that is also the perfect image of a gaze that only yearns for something similar to healing.
The story that Guarnizo lives in the depths of his flesh rather than simply telling, impresses from the first line.
The filmmaker decided one day to look for the man who in 2004 and for 603 days kept his mother kidnapped.
Beatriz Echevarry, who she is, died as a result of cancer in 2012, just when the then president of Colombia Juan Manuel Santos announced by surprise the peace dialogue with the FARC guerrillas.
"Shortly before she died I heard her say that she forgave her abductor," says the director for finding the foundation stone of everything.
In 2016 the peace accords would be signed.
Guarnizo then began to read the newspapers that his mother left and that he never even dared to touch, and the long-postponed project finally took its first steps.
The film is posed before the viewer with all the questions wide open. Where does justice end and where does revenge begin? Where does oblivion acquire the texture of guilt and where does forgiveness stop being a useless gesture and become necessary? But beyond the big and pompous doubts, there are the others, the essential ones, the simply technical ones:
does a film make sense that doesn't know where it is going?
"The idea was always there. When she was kidnapped, I was already studying filmmaking. I remember that on one occasion I was filming a picture frame of her and, suddenly, a cloud darkened the room. I shuddered," says the director between the mystery and the premonition.
The entire documentary feeds on that doubt. And in that doubt it ceases to be a mere cinematographic matter to become a lived life. And vivid. In the first part, the film tells of the filmmaker and his brother's efforts to travel inch by inch the same path as their mother through the jungle.
What she suffered and left recorded
with careful handwriting in each page of several school notebooks, they suffer again as explorers of her deepest guilt, of her deepest shame.
'On the other side'
is thus offered as an exploration into the depths, towards the most sacred, towards the heart of a jungle that is, in some way, the same jungle as all of them. It dazzles and distresses with the same force.
And so on until suddenly, and after an intense search spurred by chance and also conviction, the man named Güérima appears who kidnapped, but also took care of the mother. "I do not want to arrogate to myself the moral right to point the way to anyone. My process is only mine," he comments for not hurting and at the same time explaining himself.
"The only thing I'm saying is that speaking directly to the face removes the noise of the set phrases and the perfect hatreds.
My country, and I don't know if others as well, needed a change of narrative. There is a great fatigue that Colombia is the a country only of hatred, rage, death, violence and revenge, "he adds, aware as it is, after living in Spain for decades, that no one is safe.
The second part of the documentary runs face to face.
That of the FARC guerrilla and that of the victim's son.
They talk about how they lived the kidnapping, how he made his victim a needle to knit, how they almost died. And it is there, in a terrain as delicate as it is intimate, where wounds open to bleed and perhaps heal. Every second of
'On the other side'
lives pending each of its uncertainties with the same clarity that it refutes them. It is cinema that builds and transforms the time it inhabits. "I'm talking about the past, but I'm only interested in the future," the director comments cryptically. And who knows if it is correct.
During the kidnapping, as proof of life, the kidnappers had to let the kidnapped's children know the name of the song that the grandmother sang to her granddaughter before going to sleep.
The film ends with an old family recording of the grandmother and the granddaughter.
Together they sing
'Of colors
'.
The perfect thrill.
Image from 'Fantasía', by Aitor Merino.
FAMILY REATRATION
'
Fantasía
', by Aitor Merino, may not want so much. Or yes, but from another point of view. Also the actor who was also the director of the documentary
'Asier ETA biok
' talks about the family. And in the same way,
the idea is to achieve the forgiveness granted by the recognition of inheritance and even time.
"I was always obsessed with a painting that was in my grandfather's house that I did not get to know. It was an oil painting that copied an atypical photo in which he appears from behind walking. Perhaps my idea with this film was to compose my own family painting. "says the director.
The documentary takes its title from the name of the highly motivated tourist cruise that father, mother and the two brothers embarked on one fine day. And there, in that kind of ironic and festive celebration of the timeless time of a vacation as ridiculous as it is full, the whole film lives.
Merino manages to turn the most trivial of everyday life into a ritual, the day to day into a ceremony.
'
Fantasia
' wants no more surprises than its intimate intranscendence. And it is in that sacred space of reconciliation of shared and lived secrets where it ends up, precisely, transcending. Suddenly, Aitor Merino's family is a bit of any family, and the time that each image of the grandmother and her parakeets goes through is necessarily everyone's time.
I said, the festival, like the wind,
blows where it wants.
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