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¡Viva La Revolución!

Aftershock

A few months ago I went to the Los Angeles premiere of a horror film, Aftershock, directed by Nicolás Lopéz and produced by Eli Roth. Roth stars as an American who travels to Chile to visit local friends, but what starts as a romantic comedy about a trio of losers trying to get laid shifts dramatically and horrifically when a massive earthquake hits.

Roth, in a khaki suit, plaid shirt and blue tie, looked more the producer than director of horror films such as Hostel and the upcoming The Green Inferno. He introduced Lopéz with generous praise. Roth had known Lopéz for nearly a decade, and in the same way he had been helped early in his career, Roth explained, he wanted to give a leg-up to filmmakers like his Latin American friend. Barely 30, the Chilean native — prematurely balding, rotund and bespectacled — grabbed the microphone with the ease of a Latino Louis C.K. and worked the room with a manic energy. “Eli, he is 40 years old and so handsome. I just turned 30, and look at me. He is the George Clooney of horror and I’m the George Costanza…”

A Chilean fluent in American pop culture, making horror movies in his native country with one of today’s most distinguished Hollywood genre filmmakers? Lopéz and his films are indicative of a massive shift in Latin American filmmaking culture. Indeed, while the region’s new arthouse filmmakers attract critical press in the states, there’s another rebellion taking place south of the border — a rebellion toward genre, commercial, audience-friendly filmmaking with local DNA. It’s as if Tarantino was Latin America and the region finally got a job at Video Archives.

“My biggest influence was probably Nickelodeon…” Lopéz says. “Saved By the Bell. I’m not fucking kidding. And Back to the Future Part II. I was totally shocked when I learned there was a Back to the Future. I thought it was the fucking prequel.” Lopéz loves to pepper his phrases with the F-bomb. That, too, he learned from watching too much cable.

 

Nosotros los Nobles
Nosotros los Nobles

This past spring, Gary Alazraki’s debut feature, Nosotros Los Nobles , broke 300 million pesos ($24 million) at the Mexican box office. Released by Warner Bros., it’s the highest grossing Mexican film of all time — indeed, the highest-grossing Spanish-language film in the history of Latin America. Until recently, that title had been held by El crimen del Padre Amaro, a social drama about politics, religion and social upheaval in a Mexican pueblo. Nobles, a broad comedy about rich spoiled kids forced to live in poverty and get jobs when their father fakes bankruptcy, professes as much social drama as Trading Places, one of the movies that inspired it. “The [idea] was to make it as universal as possible,” Alazraki told me. “We stripped away all local references. We polished the universal archetypes and then did very precise research on how to dress them locally, with the idea of tapping into the universal Zeitgeist that detonated the Occupy Wall Street movement right after the 2008 crisis.”

From Mexico’s Arturo Ripstein to Chile’s Raoul Ruiz, from Brazil’s Cinema Novo of the ’60s to Colombia’s Caliwood of the ’70s, Latin America has contributed its fair share to the world cinema vault. Most of these filmmakers were hugely influenced by European auteurists or neorealist sensibilities. With the exception of Mexico, which boasted a three-decade span known as the Golden Age, a real industry never existed. The commercial filmmakers were the bastard children: Los Olvidados, the Forgotten Ones.

But now that’s changed — and I didn’t know it at the time, but I was right there in middle of it when it started to happen.

After a year in the L.A. film industry in the early ’90s, I moved to Colombia. I wanted to be a screenwriter, and I wanted life experience. It was a good time for that, too. The ’90s in Colombia were off the hook. Pablo Escobar. The FARC. Narco-terrorism. Crazy parties. Beautiful women.

I had the opportunity to work for a commercial producer in Colombia. I packed my bags and left for Bogotá only to find that the Minister of Energy had vanished with $800 million in government money and was hiding somewhere in Switzerland. With the inevitable energy shortages that ensued, the government was forced to shut down power from 6:00 p.m. to 10:00 p.m. each night. That meant no primetime television, which meant no commercials, which meant no job. So I traveled a bit, worked as an English teacher, did some freelance journalism and, once my Spanish was decent enough, became a Spanish-language TV writer. I wrote kids shows, an action series, animation, even a telenovela, and eventually I co-wrote a feature film called Golpe de Estadio. Directed by Sergio Cabrera, Golpe de Estadio was a political satire about the ongoing war between the FARC and the Colombian government and their common love of soccer.

During all this, I was starving to watch cinema. You see, I was born in 1969, and I grew up watching blockbusters before the term was a dirty word. I waited in three-city-block-long lines to see Star Wars and Jaws in the theaters. In college, I discovered both the new masters and the classics: the Red, White and Blue series by Kie?lowski, early Jeunet, Kiarostami. With Sundance and Tarantino, the U.S. indie wave was heating up around this time, too. I wanted to see it all.

But then I left for Colombia, and you couldn’t. Not in Colombia. Not in the ’90s.

Most of my friends from the Colombian TV world wanted to be filmmakers. They all had scripts under their arms while shooting their novelas. And nearly all of them, almost without exception, had been trained in San Antonio de los Baños in Cuba. The school was founded in the mid ’80s by Colombian Pulitzer prize-winning novelist Gabriel García Márquez. Close friends with Castro, he believed Hollywood was propagating the wrong kind of storytelling — or at least only one kind of storytelling — and that San Antonio should be a place where the Latin American voice was nurtured and fortified.

Living in Bogotá, we did whatever we could to see movies. The Museo de Arte Moderno programmed retrospectives. We saw every Wim Wenders movie in a four-day span, even the iffy ones, even when the prints didn’t have subtitles or were scratched or chopped to abstraction.

I had never seen A Clockwork Orange or Apocalypse Now, and a friend turned me onto a priest in Medellín who had both in his extensive laser disc collection. For $40 an hour he would record the discs on VHS. I spent half my month’s salary buying those movies. I ate rice and beans for the last two weeks of the month because I spent most of my salary to buy those films. I studied those movies shot-by-shot and soon could recite every juicy line of dialogue.

I didn’t know it at the time, but I was basically living the life of every middle-class filmmaker in Latin America. From Mexico to Argentina, in varying degrees, the flow of information and media was coming at a stuttered and frustratingly inconsistent rate in comparison with their “first world” counterparts. If you couldn’t afford to travel abroad, you had very little access to the latest cinema. So you got what you could from the sketchiest of sources and your learning curve was almost a flat line. It showed in the filmmakers’ vocabulary. How do you learn to speak when you are missing vowels, let alone grammar?

New World Entertainment was one of the biggest independent producers of movies and TV in the ’80s. My friend and mentor Jim McNamara ran sales for them before becoming their CEO. “For a lot of studios and sales outfits, Latin America was an afterthought,” he told me recently. “It’s 5, maybe 6 percent of your total value for international, and there was too much volatility in the marketplace. Movie tickets cost maybe fifty cents, so there wasn’t enough upside to sell your movies there. That’s why if you’re a kid in Latin America, you didn’t see half the films the rest of the world saw. Too much hassle to sell there.”

But by the late ’90s, as the DVD player became ubiquitous, free trade agreements opened borders. U.S. cable networks started programming for Latin America, Internet connections became faster and more accessible across Latin America, and this new generation emerged, spoon-fed the same diet of TV and film as their North American cousins.

Todd Brown, founder of the website Twitch, which features news and reviews on international films, relates. “You hear the exact same stories amongst the young generation in Scandinavia, for instance,” he says. “They’re very well trained in the local schools but have no interest in making their parents’ movies and so are looking for a voice of their own, which inevitably involves a fusion of local and international influences.”

And the local influences are what make some of these films so exciting.  Jaime Osorio Marquez’s El Páramo, released in 2011, tells the story of a squadron of Colombian soldiers who investigate an army station high in the Andes Mountains, where a squadron has gone missing. They find signs of foul play and then discover a strange woman sealed up in one of the walls of the station. Once they release her, fog rolls in over the mountain, paranoia takes over and soon they begin killing each other. Is the woman from the guerrilla? A paramilitary? Or a witch? Having lived in Colombia during what is probably considered the most violent decade in its history, I know that sense of paranoia. We all felt it. In 1992, I traveled by bus from Santa Marta in the very north to Ecuador. The bus would be stopped for routine checks. You never knew if it was the police or the guerrillas. El Páramo reminded me of that time.

Saving Private Perez
Saving Private Perez

Lemon Films, a production company founded by Mexican producers Billy and Fernando Rovzar, puts a very local accent on their very American sensibility. Born and raised in Mexico, they went to high school in the U.S., and it shows in their films. Saving Private Perez, directed by Beto Gómez, tells the story of a group of ragtag narcos that goes to Iraq to save the mob boss’ brother, who has enlisted in the U.S. army. Part spaghetti Western, part Hollywood send-up, it’s chock-full of Mexican double entendres, chase sequences and explosions, but also hilariously captures the idiosyncrasies of the narco megawealthy, a painful reality in Mexico today.

Two years ago in Cuba, Juan Brugués wrote and directed Juan of the Dead. It has been deemed Cuba’s first horror film (although it’s more of a horror-comedy and might compete with the 1985 animated feature Vampiros en La Habana for that distinction). Ironically, where George Romero, half Cuban himself, imbued Night of the Living Dead with an anti-Vietnam message, Brugués used the zombies to take on the communist regime (no small feat while shooting there). Well-made, fun and with an inventive cinematic style, Juan of the Dead may feel like a rip-off, but it has enough local flavor and politics to allow it a place alongside the work of Edgar Wright and Ruben Fleischer.

Colombia, with its ever-expanding tax incentives, is now producing as many as 20 to 25 films a year. Between the one or two that inevitably wind their way to Cannes or Sundance, and the annual mass-audience “pueblo”-targeted films of telenovela writer and producer Dago Garcia, there is a new breed of high-end commercial film, many of which are produced by the prolific Dynamo Capital.

Rodrigo Guerrero, who studied at New York University and started his career working for producer Paul Mezey on Maria Full of Grace, co-founded Dynamo nearly 10 years ago. Emailing me from the set of his latest film, Guerrero wrote, “Unlike Latin American filmmakers from the ’70s or ’80s, we have no political agenda. Film for us is not a tool to support a social revolution. We all grew up on American movies. Colombian filmmakers that came before us were schooled mostly in Europe. Our generation has been schooled [mostly] in the U.S.”

Guerrero works regularly with two Colombian filmmakers, Andy Baiz and Carlos Moreno. Mixing dark comedy, horror and drama to chilling effect, Baiz’s debut, Satanás, is a hyperviolent trilogy of intertwining stories set in Bogotá. His second film, La Cara Occulta, is a Hitchcockian thriller co-financed by Fox’s international division. It did well enough in Colombia and Spain to spawn an English-language remake currently in development.

Perro Come Perro
Perro Come Perro

Moreno, who has now premiered twice at Sundance with Perro Come Perro and Todos Tus Muertos, hails from the grittier side of the filmmaking universe, more Paul Greengrass by way of Scorsese. An editor by training, his handheld, quick-cut style has a kinetic energy that embodies a raw, nasty, but very human and often darkly funny, side of the Colombian experience. His films feature narco gangsters, guerrilla and paramilitary soldiers in neorealist ticking-clock thrillers and comedies.

Uruguayan filmmaker Fede Alvarez went from a short film about robots invading Montevideo, Ataque de Panico!, directly to the Sam Raimi-produced Evil Dead remake. His special effects house, Aparato, who created the effects in the original video, did the title sequence for his new film (and, if only to reinforce how flat the world is, are doing all the effects on my lucha libre superhero send-up, Aztec Warrior, directed by Black Dynamite’s Scott Sanders).

In Chile, before Aftershock, Lopéz directed a romantic comedy trilogy called Fuck My Life, Fuck My Wedding and Fuck My Family, an Apatow-styled love letter to Chile’s capital, Santiago. Meanwhile, fellow Colombian Ernesto Diaz Espinoza turns out Robert Rodriguez-type B-movie martial arts films that seem to always premiere at Fantastic Fest.

When I mentioned I was writing this article to my friend and colleague Gabriel Ripstein, he bristled a bit. “Careful, Odell. Don’t crap on my people,” he warned jokingly. Fair enough. His grandfather, producer Alfredo Ripstein, is one of the godfathers of the Golden Age of Cinema.  And his father is arthouse legend Arturo, who was tributed recently in a retrospective at Harvard. Gabriel was raised on Bergman and Kurosawa. His father assisted Buñuel when he first started making movies in Mexico. But as I told Gabriel in response: just because we project movies on the same screen, we needn’t judge them the same way. I love that Mexicans won Best Director at Cannes the past two years. I was blown away by Michel Franco’s film Después de Lucía, which took Un Certain Regard in 2012. Carlos Reygadas never disappoints. Nor does Gerardo Naranjo. Pablo Larraín’s Oscar-nominated No last year was wonderful, but he had me since his first feature, Tony Manero, one of the boldest, strangest and most mesmerizing films to come out of Latin America ever. There are so many exquisite arthouse films each year from Latin America, it’s hard to keep track.

But there’s room for it all. And it’s nice to see local filmmakers taking on Hollywood at its own game and winning. Says Lopéz, “I’d love to make a big fucking blockbuster one day in Hollywood. After my first movie, Promedio Rojo, played at Fantastic Fest in 2005, I signed with ICM and everyone wanted to make my next movie, Santos. An executive at one of the big studios reads it and says, ‘I read The Matrix script and I didn’t understand it, so I passed. I didn’t understand your script either, and I don’t want the same thing to happen, so we’re going to make this.’ I’m like, ‘That’s fucking stupid, but okay…’ Six months later and we’re still working on the deal. So I went and made it for $6 million with a Chile-Spain co-production. There’s freedom making the stories we do the way we do them. I love Hollywood, I love their stories, but I want to make movies, not deals. There’s so much red tape and so many people making decisions… I just want to tell them my way… I mean, I take the calls when they come, but I keep making my own movies meanwhile.” He’s shooting his seventh now. His eighth is scheduled for production in the fall.

Arthouse movies have always been a staple of Latin America. But it’s exciting to see the region’s brethren of the commercial kind exploring new waters, too. I look forward to what Lopéz and his colleagues come up with next.

The rebellion has just begun.

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