Shots of history

Wending their way past spilled popcorn and posters of SpongeBob SquarePants, Danilo Migone and Paola Squadritto were explaining why they’d passed up the feel-good Hollywood fluff at a local cineplex to see a film that touches on one of the darkest chapters in recent South American history. The movie in question, Andres Wood’s “Machuca,” is the well-crafted, gut-wrenching story of two Chilean boys from opposite social worlds who become schoolmates, then unlikely best friends.

But their relationship literally goes up in flames on Sept. 11, 1973. On that day, Gen. Augusto Pinochet led a bloody right-wing coup against Chile’s democratically elected socialist president, Salvador Allende Gossens. More than 30 years later, this violent Cold War spasm, which ended with military planes bombing Chile’s presidential palace, is still so bitterly divisive that some Chileans refuse to discuss it. “There are people that never have accepted it,” says Squadritto, 34, an anthropologist.

“Machuca,” which opened last month in Los Angeles, depicts a very different Chile from the one that exists today. But Migone thinks that by taking a long, hard look at its past through films like “Machuca,” his country may be better able to comprehend its present and contemplate its future. “There’s a transformation that the movie reflected,” says Migone, 36, a computer engineer. “It shows a Chile that has disappeared.”

Throughout Latin America, a bumper crop of recent and forthcoming feature films is bringing audiences face to face with some of the hemisphere’s most turbulent issues and fateful historical events. A generation or less since numerous Latin countries kicked out military dictators or ended prolonged civil wars and tentatively embraced democracy, a growing number of filmmakers are revisiting pivotal episodes from both the near and the distant past.

Confronting the past

In many cases, the resulting movies are filling in gaps in their country’s collective memories and peeling back layers of censorship, distortion, fear and official denial.

In Brazil, two recent releases, Lucia Murat’s “Quase Dois Irmaos” (Almost Brothers) and Toni Venturi’s “Cabra-Cega,” are set against the backdrop of Brazil’s military dictatorship, which stretched from the mid-1960s through the mid-1980s. Murat, a former student activist, was herself imprisoned and tortured during that era.

The Mexican director Alfonso Cuaron (“Y Tu Mama Tambien”), fresh off the success of “Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban,” is planning a drama about Mexico’s student-led protests in 1968 leading to the Summer Olympic Games that culminated in an infamous massacre and a decades-long government cover-up.

While many of the new Latin films are awaiting U.S. distributors, they’ve carted away bushels of prizes, and some have broken domestic box office records. They’ve also sparked debates from San Salvador to Medellin to Rio de Janeiro as audiences, reviewers and the filmmakers themselves wrestle with questions about where their societies have been and where they may be headed.

“I think the problems of the past are the problems of the present,” says Elia K. Schneider, the veteran Venezuelan director of “Huelepega” (Glue Sniffer) and the 2004 Oscar submission “Punto y Raya” (Step Forward), an odd-couple comedy-drama about two soldiers on opposite sides of Venezuela and Colombia’s long-running border dispute. At first glance, the soldiers appear to have no common ground: The Colombian, Pedro (Edgar Ramirez), is an idealistic campesino, while the Venezuelan, Cheito (Roque Valero), is a wily Caracas street hustler and deserter.

By the end of the movie, which a Variety reviewer compared to “MASH” and “The Defiant Ones,” these chuckleheaded warriors have arrived at a separate peace of sorts, but their countries are still trading lethal potshots. Through mordant humor, humane observation and the perfectly calibrated lead performances, “Step Forward” spoofs Latin macho hysteria and calls into question the very idea of trumped-up saber-rattling nationalism.

What’s heartening about movies like “Machuca” and “Step Forward” is that they’re informing viewers and engaging them emotionally, using a variety of genres and narrative strategies -- realism, melodrama, black comedy, surrealism, allegory -- to get at larger issues.

Some, like Luis Mandoki’s “Voces Inocentes” (Innocent Voices), which depicts El Salvador’s ruinous civil war through a young boy’s eyes, take a straightforward, almost documentary-like view of their harrowing subjects. By contrast, the exquisitely deadpan Uruguayan movie “Whisky” uses the tale of a sullen sock factory owner to probe deeper forms of South American spiritual malaise.

Although most of the new films lack marquee actors -- with exceptions such as Walter Salles’ “The Motorcycle Diaries,” which stars Mexican alt-heartthrob Gael Garcia Bernal as the young Che Guevara -- they are introducing European and North American audiences to up-and-coming Spanish- and Portuguese-speaking talent. And they are opening up a part of the world that many in the United States, confronting a surging Latino population in their own backyard, feel an urgent need to know better.

Salles, 49, says this new wave of bold, socially conscious Latin cinema started taking shape in the last decade or so, as filmmakers began seeking an authentic voice after years of languishing under repressive regimes. As part of that process, many inevitably have turned to the past for inspiration. “Without looking back to the past,” says Salles by phone from his offices in Rio de Janeiro, “it’s very hard to find who you are.”

Non-U.S. viewpoints

Lately, the new wave has gathered speed as it sweeps across the region and gains attention far beyond Latin America. “Innocent Voices,” based on the experiences of L.A. actor and screenwriter Oscar Torres, was Mexico’s official best foreign film entry last year. It stirred a wasp’s nest of political controversy when it screened in El Salvador last year and won the Berlin Film Festival’s Crystal Bear award. It will be opening this year throughout Latin America and in Europe.

But “Innocent Voices,” which offers a frank depiction of the U.S. government’s role in training and supplying the Salvadoran army in its fight against Marxist guerrillas, has yet to land a U.S. distributor. Director Mandoki says that U.S. distributors tend to be wary of non-English-language films in general. And he acknowledges that his film may face an additional hurdle because it takes a critical view of what happens when the U.S. tries to, in his words, “fix” other countries.

“In Hollywood, we don’t have the mandate to do movies with social conscience,” says Mandoki, a U.S. citizen who recently moved back to his native Mexico after 16 years in Southern California, where he built a career directing romantic dramas such as 1990’s “White Palace.”

“In America, the information we get is very small,” Mandoki continues. “We don’t know anything that’s beyond our borders, usually. So I think the most important country for this movie to be seen in is America. And I’m not talking commercially, because this movie will make its money back in the rest of the world.”

A distinctly non-American viewpoint also suffuses Antonio Dorado’s “El Rey” (The King), which traces the swift, sordid rise and fall of a charismatic Colombian narcotics capo played by Fernando Solorzano. (The director calls him “a tropical Al Pacino,” with pardonable hyperbole.) Set in the metropolitan drug mecca of Cali beginning in the mid-1960s, “El Rey” is a high-octane melodrama that evokes Hollywood revisionist-gangster classics like “Scarface” and “Once Upon a Time in America.”

Dorado, a university film studies professor and documentary maker, spent seven years researching and making the movie, undaunted by the high costs of doing a period film, or by nervous Colombian producers who warned him that the public would shun the film’s subject. His doggedness paid off: “El Rey” performed very well at home, was Colombia’s official Oscar entry last year, and probably will have its U.S. release this year.

In a way, “El Rey” offers a political counterpoint to the more widely seen Colombian-American production “Maria Full of Grace,” about a desperate young woman (Oscar-nominated actress Catalina Sandino Moreno) who comes to New York as a drug “mule,” carrying sealed heroin balls in her belly. Though it doesn’t glamorize its criminal protagonist, “El Rey” insists on seeing him not just as a predatory monster but as a complex, almost tragic figure a la Tony Soprano or the multigenerational protagonists of “The Godfather” films.

“El Rey” also reflects the view, highly prevalent south of the Rio Grande, that the drug problem is caused as much by U.S. consumers as by Latin American growers and distributors who feed their voracious appetites. One of its main characters is an American Peace Corps worker who becomes El Rey’s right-hand man and eventually betrays him.

Like the coveted silver in Joseph Conrad’s 1904 Latin American-set novel “Nostromo,” the “white gold” of cocaine in “El Rey” eventually corrupts everyone and everything it touches, including an idealistic leftist revolutionary. But the movie also draws on Dorado’s belief that the coca plant, which is used to make cocaine and whose medicinal uses have been valued since pre-Columbian times, has been irrationally and hypocritically “demonized.” Dorado’s provocative, well-informed worldview sets “El Rey” apart from quotidian Hollywood cops-and-robbers flicks that use the drug trade as exotic window dressing for orgiastic violence and hollow moralizing.

Documentaries pave the way

If Latin filmmakers in the past sometimes lagged behind Latin politics, so have their Hollywood counterparts. For example, while the last U.S. forces limped away from Vietnam in 1973, it wasn’t until the late ‘70s that Hollywood began seriously probing the war’s scars in movies like “The Deer Hunter,” “Coming Home” and “Apocalypse Now.” But before any of those films, Peter Davis’ Oscar-winning documentary, “Hearts and Minds” (1974), brought Vietnam to the big screen and gave Americans an outlet for their conflicted, still-raw emotions.

Similarly, a handful of Latin American documentaries have helped open up once-taboo topics to feature filmmakers. Not coincidentally, several Latin directors making socially conscientious feature films also make documentaries. Salles, Dorado and Mandoki are in that number, as is Katia Lund, who co-directed the international hit “City of God,” about Brazil’s rampant youth gang violence. She’d previously spent years researching and making the documentary “News From a Private War” about the country’s crime-breeding slums, or favelas.

“Brazilian film has always been influenced by the urgency we see in the streets, and it’s as though we try to capture what happens in front of our very eyes and transfer it to the wide screen,” Salles says.

In Chile, documentary maker Patricio Guzman helped pry open the national Pandora’s box marked “Pinochet coup” with a series of groundbreaking documentaries, including “The Battle of Chile,” “Chile, Obstinate Memory” and “Salvador Allende.” For U.S. viewers, the latter film’s most striking moment may be when former U.S. Ambassador to Chile Edward Korry describes Allende as “an extraordinarily civilized human being” -- after previously relating how Korry’s boss, President Richard Nixon, called Allende an s.o.b. and, pounding his fist, vowed to destroy him through economic pressure.

Andres Wood’s “Machuca” brings these towering historical conflicts down to human scale through the characters of Gonzalo (Matias Quer), an 11-year-old upper-middle-class Santiago schoolboy, and his classmate Pedro Machuca (Ariel Mateluna), a poor, indigenous scholarship student from the capital’s slums. The boys’ friendship takes root despite the growing political tensions surrounding Allende’s presidency, specifically the fears of upper- and middle-class Chileans that Allende’s socialist policies would drive the country to financial collapse.

Wood, born in 1965, who also co-wrote the screenplay, says that “Machuca” contains a number of “very personal” if not strictly autobiographical elements.

Like Gonzalo, Wood hails from a middle-class home and attended an elite but progressive, predominantly English-language prep school whose rector believed that rich and poor children should be educated together. His father, an architect, and mother, a kindergarten teacher, though politically “not of the extreme right,” Wood says, were conservative and “in favor of ending the Allende government.”

Rather than trying to encompass the tragic saga of the Allende years, Wood says, he wanted to tell a much more partial and subjective story without a specific political viewpoint. By focusing on Gonzalo’s awakening moral conscience, “Machuca” lays bare the survivors’ guilt and shame that continue to haunt Chilean society.

“This is our Vietnam, in this sense,” Wood says. “Lamentably, it’s going to continue to divide many people. But it’s better to talk about it and to take it on than to cover it up.”

Leaders of a renaissance

Nowhere in this hemisphere is regional film culture enjoying more of a renaissance than in Brazil and Argentina, which not coincidentally are two of the three Latin American countries with the most developed film industries (Mexico is the third). Salles says that during Brazil’s military dictatorship, film production was tightly controlled and censorship was harsh and intimidating.

Many Brazilian directors fled into exile, and only a few stayed on and fought. One was Cinema Novo founding father Nelson Pereira dos Santos, whose 1950s neorealist classic “Rio, 40 Degrees” will be screened June 29 at the Orpheum Theatre in downtown Los Angeles as part of the “Last Remaining Seats” series of the Los Angeles Conservancy and the Latin American Cinemateca of Los Angeles.

Salles says the new cinematic cycle began in the mid-1990s with the release of Carla Camurati’s “Carlota Joaquina, Princesa do Brasil” (Carlota Joaquina, Princess of Brazil). An outlandish historical comedy about Portuguese colonial rule of Brazil, the film signaled the return of bold experimentalism and social awareness. Though the movie takes place in the colonial era, Salles says, Brazilian viewers were hip to its contemporary parallels.

A number of Salles’ own films, including “Terra Estrangeira” (Foreign Land) and the 1998 “Central do Brasil” (Central Station), have focused on alienated Brazilians trying to recover from the physical and psychological dislocations of the dictatorship. Two years ago, after a long, health-induced absence from the film world, the influential Brazilian director Hector Babenco returned to form with “Carandiru,” about the conflicts that led to the 1992 massacre of 111 inmates at the notorious Sao Paulo prison of that name.

But it is Salles’ “The Motorcycle Diaries,” which won Oscars last year for best adapted screenplay and original song, that encapsulates the broader, regional search for identity that is animating so much Latin American cinema.

“The Motorcycle Diaries” relates the saga of the 8,000-mile trip that the young Che Guevara took with a friend across South America in 1952, and it suggests a link between South America’s past struggles and its current challenges. In one of the movie’s most poignant passages, set at a leper colony where the young men have been volunteering, Garcia Bernal’s Che makes an impromptu speech about realizing through his travels that all Latin America is essentially one people and culture, with a single binding history.

Some might dismiss that sentiment as naive or as Guevara’s nascent Marxist fantasy of turning the continent into a bloody ideological battleground.

But as Salles points out, the concept of a united, integrated South America is being revived today, as the continent considers whether to enter into more regional economic and political alliances, perhaps something akin to the European Union.

Even if Hollywood isn’t tuned into this cultural dialogue, Salles says, Latin filmmakers are having it among themselves. “Five or six years ago we knew very little about Argentine cinema in Brazil,” Salles says. “The market was so dominated by Hollywood, there were few screens, and the Argentine films didn’t travel to Brazil and the Brazilian films didn’t travel to Argentina.”

Now, Salles says, “the opposite is happening,” and the countries’ cultural ministries are promoting film exchanges.

“The countries in Latin America are young countries, whose identities are still in the making,” Salles continues. “If you look at most European countries, their identities are fully crystallized. At our end of the world, we’re still defining who we want to be, and many possibilities are still open.”

*

Contact Reed Johnson at Calendar.letters@latimes.com.