El drama de los desplazados colombianos llega a Ecuador a través de la gran pantalla en un festival de cine que comienza hoy, organizado por el Alto Comisionado de las Naciones Unidas para los Refugiados (Acnur).
Por Núria Segura
EFE
Una de las cintas es la colombiana "Pequeñas voces", la primera película en 3D producida íntegramente en Suramérica, que relata la vida de cuatro niños que viven el conflicto colombiano, explicó a Efe el codirector de esta película Óscar Andrade.
Se utilizó la técnica 3D, precisó, para darle "voz a estos niños de una manera que no fuera ofensiva para el público".
Andrade manifestó que el filme, que se estrenó hace tres semanas en Colombia, relata la situación de estos menores "y su vida en el campo, la relación con la familia, su entorno, su forma de vivir".
El codirector enfatizó que se trata de rescatar "todo lo humano" del conflicto "a través de la mirada inocente de los niños que no tiene nada de política".
La película, nominada en la categoría de nuevos talentos del Festival de Venecia, se proyecta en el marco del ciclo de cine "Convivir en Solidaridad", que se desarrollará hasta el 6 de octubre, y que es organizado por Acnur, con la finalidad de abrir el debate sobre los desplazados, los refugiados y los inmigrantes.
En el certamen, entre otras, también participan la argentina "La mosca en la ceniza", que habla de dos chicas en un pequeño pueblo de ese país, "Rabia", una producción colombiana, mexicana y española que trata sobre la vida de unos inmigrantes a España, así como la mexicana "La Misma Luna", la historia de un niño y su madre, que trabaja de forma ilegal en los Estados Unidos.
La vida de tres niños en la sierra andina colombiana que tienen que enfrentarse a la disputa entre guerrilleros y paramilitares es el argumento de "Los Colores de la Montaña", según explica Carlos César Arbelaéz, su director.
Manuel, Juliano y Poca luz quieren ser futbolistas y un día les regalan un balón muy bueno, pero cuando empiezan a jugar con él, la pelota cae en un campo minado.
"En un primer plano, la película trata de cómo recuperar el balón, en un segundo plano, sobre el desplazamiento, la amistad", explicó Arbelaéz.
La cinta, que fue premiada el año pasado en el Festival de San Sebastián (España), también narra la llegada de los paramilitares a una zona donde había guerrilla, lo que provocó el desplazamiento de muchas personas, porque ambos lados tomaron la postura de que "estabas con ellos o contra ellos".
El cineasta dijo que en su país el conflicto armado ha dejado entre 4,5 y 5 millones de desplazados, pero la realidad es que también ha traspasado fronteras.
Según datos de la Cancillería ecuatoriana, en este país viven 54.000 refugiados, de los cuales el 98 % son colombianos.
Precisamente ayer, en la localidad limítrofe colombiana de Ipiales, se reunieron el canciller ecuatoriano, Ricardo Patiño, con su homóloga colombiana, María Ángeles Holguín, para abordar el tema de los refugiados que viven en Ecuador.
El presidente ecuatoriano, Rafael Correa, pidió a Colombia en una rueda de prensa "corresponsabilidad" para atender a los refugiados.
"Somos un país muy humano, muy solidario, que recibimos con los brazos abiertos a los que quieran ingresar a nuestra patria, pero somos el país de América Latina con más número de refugiados y somos también un país pobre y eso (la llegada de refugiados) hace colapsar nuestros servicios de salud o educativo", señaló Correa.
Pese a que el conflicto colombiano empezó hace más de cincuenta años, Arbelaéz se muestra optimista de que algún día termine.
"No hay mal que dure cien años, ni cuerpo que lo resista", sentenció.
viernes, 30 de septiembre de 2011
jueves, 22 de septiembre de 2011
‘Roger & Me’ (Michael Moore)
By Hal Hinson
Washington Post Staff Writer
January 12, 1990
"Roger & Me," Michael Moore's documentary about the effects of General Motors plant closings in his hometown of Flint, Mich., is a hilariously cranky bit of propaganda. One part home movie, one part editorial, one part letter bomb, the film is a one-man insurrection. And -- imagine that -- the man is just some yob with a movie camera, an auto worker's son who has never made a film before and who sees in the demise of his home city the perfect metaphor for everything that's gone wrong with America.
The result is one of the most subversively comic political films in memory. Moore presents "Roger & Me" as his End of the '80s essay, his attempt to reclaim the decade from those who would have it remembered as an upbeat era of rebuilding and progress. His subject, in the most limited sense, is Flint itself. As the home to several major GM facilities, Flint was a proud industrial town caught up in the great postwar American dream. But due to shutdowns and layoffs, more than 30,000 workers lost their jobs, leaving Flint desolate, rat-infested, a city with teeming jails, a soaring crime rate and plummeting expectations -- a postindustrial American wasteland that Money magazine proclaimed the worst place to live in the country.
About all this Moore is deeply funny and deeply serious. When the laughs come -- and there are more here than in any movie I saw all last year -- they have a prankster's reckless irreverence. His target and elusive costar is GM Chairman Roger B. Smith, whom Moore tracks throughout the movie in an attempt to confront him with the devastation his company has left in its wake.
Moore loves making trouble, but his impudence is multilayered and fueled, primarily, by rage. He comes on in "Roger & Me" with the bratty effrontery of a party crasher, out to spoil everyone's fun. He dogs Smith at his office (where he offers the security forces his Chuck E Cheese discount card for identification), at his yacht club in Grosse Pointe, at his athletic club in Detroit. Moore even manages somehow to gain entrance to GM's annual stockholders meeting, where his mike is cut just as he is about to speak.
The party Moore's crashing here, though, is the Reagan '80s. Acting as the film's curmudgeonly master of ceremonies, Moore presents a collection of sneaky riffs on a score of topics, both large and small -- from unionism and capitalism to Pat Boone, beauty pageants and game shows -- and spins them into a highly personal, shorthand history of American corporate collapse.
On another level, it's a kind of critique of the great American dream of sunny, smiley-face, middle-class prosperity. Moore's greatest gift is his feel for the native American surrealism -- his sense of us as a people who love diving donkeys and dancing spark plugs and parades with Shriners driving around in miniature Model T's. To Moore, these funky absurdities are on a direct line with an attempt to raise spirits in Flint by bringing the Rev. Robert Schuller to town to say things like "Tough times don't last, tough people do." Or Anita Bryant's buck-up rendition of "You'll Never Walk Alone." Or Ronald Reagan's kind offer to buy pizza for 10 unemployed auto workers. To demonstrate his appreciation, one of the guests rips off the pizzeria's cash register on his way out.
Two motifs connect these various plot threads: the search for Roger and the operations of Sheriff's Deputy Fred Ross, who, with cool efficiency, travels around town, pounding on doors and evicting families from their homes. The latter's scenes work as dark counterpoint to the generally amused tone; they're the movie's dire bottom line. Without them, it might come across as a glib radical cartoon.
Wearing baggy jeans, a windbreaker and a cap reading "I'm out for Trout," Moore styles himself as a kind of beer-bellied rube, but the Average Joe pose is merely an elaborate disguise for a highly sophisticated, cagey wit. Moore is a naysayer in the classic American tradition -- a working-class sorehead with attitude to burn. Class anger is part of what drives him. He hates the twits who dress up in costume for their "Great Gatsby" party or rush to plunk down $100 to spend the night in the city's spanking new jail. In essence, though, he's an equal-opportunity basher -- everyone gets a turn, and he's nearly as scathing in his derision for one woman who slaughters rabbits to make ends meet. Or the future Miss America, Kaye Lani Rae Rafko, who virtually quivers in front of the camera, desperate not to put her foot in her mouth.
As a comic, Moore sees virtually everyone as fair game, but then he presents himself in nearly as harsh a light as the others. None comes off as badly as the eponymous Roger, though. Reading his bland Christmas message to the stockholders and their children, he quotes Dickens, and in the process he becomes mythic, the personification of the heartless capitalist -- a real-life Scrooge.
When I first saw the film, it struck me as the most impressively articulated response to the Reagan era I'd seen. Since then it has come out that Moore has -- either intentionally or through lack of skill -- fuzzied the chronology of events, creating the impression that the plant closings and layoffs took place all at once, around 1986 and '87, instead of over a period of more than a decade. In other instances too, Moore may have fallen short of factual accuracy.
Though this doesn't invalidate his political points, it does cast them in a more dubious light -- and Moore along with them. The unfortunate effect of this imprecision is to reduce a great film to a nearly great one. It does not, however, interfere with our pleasure at seeing Pat Boone refer to Roger Smith as a "can-do kinda guy." Or diminish the epic silliness of the city's efforts to rescue Flint by turning it into a tourist center with the construction of a Hyatt Hotel, a shopping center and, as its biggest draw, a Disney World-type tribute to the auto industry called AutoWorld.
In "Roger & Me," Moore's brand of slapstick reportage strikes the perfect balance between irony and sincerity; it's slyly deadpan and committed, democratic and kingly all at once. In the end, though, he winds up giving ironic credence to the swells at the Great Gatsby party who advise the laid-off workers to get out there and do something. He's shown what one man with a camera crew and a vision can do.
Washington Post Staff Writer
January 12, 1990
"Roger & Me," Michael Moore's documentary about the effects of General Motors plant closings in his hometown of Flint, Mich., is a hilariously cranky bit of propaganda. One part home movie, one part editorial, one part letter bomb, the film is a one-man insurrection. And -- imagine that -- the man is just some yob with a movie camera, an auto worker's son who has never made a film before and who sees in the demise of his home city the perfect metaphor for everything that's gone wrong with America.
The result is one of the most subversively comic political films in memory. Moore presents "Roger & Me" as his End of the '80s essay, his attempt to reclaim the decade from those who would have it remembered as an upbeat era of rebuilding and progress. His subject, in the most limited sense, is Flint itself. As the home to several major GM facilities, Flint was a proud industrial town caught up in the great postwar American dream. But due to shutdowns and layoffs, more than 30,000 workers lost their jobs, leaving Flint desolate, rat-infested, a city with teeming jails, a soaring crime rate and plummeting expectations -- a postindustrial American wasteland that Money magazine proclaimed the worst place to live in the country.
About all this Moore is deeply funny and deeply serious. When the laughs come -- and there are more here than in any movie I saw all last year -- they have a prankster's reckless irreverence. His target and elusive costar is GM Chairman Roger B. Smith, whom Moore tracks throughout the movie in an attempt to confront him with the devastation his company has left in its wake.
Moore loves making trouble, but his impudence is multilayered and fueled, primarily, by rage. He comes on in "Roger & Me" with the bratty effrontery of a party crasher, out to spoil everyone's fun. He dogs Smith at his office (where he offers the security forces his Chuck E Cheese discount card for identification), at his yacht club in Grosse Pointe, at his athletic club in Detroit. Moore even manages somehow to gain entrance to GM's annual stockholders meeting, where his mike is cut just as he is about to speak.
The party Moore's crashing here, though, is the Reagan '80s. Acting as the film's curmudgeonly master of ceremonies, Moore presents a collection of sneaky riffs on a score of topics, both large and small -- from unionism and capitalism to Pat Boone, beauty pageants and game shows -- and spins them into a highly personal, shorthand history of American corporate collapse.
On another level, it's a kind of critique of the great American dream of sunny, smiley-face, middle-class prosperity. Moore's greatest gift is his feel for the native American surrealism -- his sense of us as a people who love diving donkeys and dancing spark plugs and parades with Shriners driving around in miniature Model T's. To Moore, these funky absurdities are on a direct line with an attempt to raise spirits in Flint by bringing the Rev. Robert Schuller to town to say things like "Tough times don't last, tough people do." Or Anita Bryant's buck-up rendition of "You'll Never Walk Alone." Or Ronald Reagan's kind offer to buy pizza for 10 unemployed auto workers. To demonstrate his appreciation, one of the guests rips off the pizzeria's cash register on his way out.
Two motifs connect these various plot threads: the search for Roger and the operations of Sheriff's Deputy Fred Ross, who, with cool efficiency, travels around town, pounding on doors and evicting families from their homes. The latter's scenes work as dark counterpoint to the generally amused tone; they're the movie's dire bottom line. Without them, it might come across as a glib radical cartoon.
Wearing baggy jeans, a windbreaker and a cap reading "I'm out for Trout," Moore styles himself as a kind of beer-bellied rube, but the Average Joe pose is merely an elaborate disguise for a highly sophisticated, cagey wit. Moore is a naysayer in the classic American tradition -- a working-class sorehead with attitude to burn. Class anger is part of what drives him. He hates the twits who dress up in costume for their "Great Gatsby" party or rush to plunk down $100 to spend the night in the city's spanking new jail. In essence, though, he's an equal-opportunity basher -- everyone gets a turn, and he's nearly as scathing in his derision for one woman who slaughters rabbits to make ends meet. Or the future Miss America, Kaye Lani Rae Rafko, who virtually quivers in front of the camera, desperate not to put her foot in her mouth.
As a comic, Moore sees virtually everyone as fair game, but then he presents himself in nearly as harsh a light as the others. None comes off as badly as the eponymous Roger, though. Reading his bland Christmas message to the stockholders and their children, he quotes Dickens, and in the process he becomes mythic, the personification of the heartless capitalist -- a real-life Scrooge.
When I first saw the film, it struck me as the most impressively articulated response to the Reagan era I'd seen. Since then it has come out that Moore has -- either intentionally or through lack of skill -- fuzzied the chronology of events, creating the impression that the plant closings and layoffs took place all at once, around 1986 and '87, instead of over a period of more than a decade. In other instances too, Moore may have fallen short of factual accuracy.
Though this doesn't invalidate his political points, it does cast them in a more dubious light -- and Moore along with them. The unfortunate effect of this imprecision is to reduce a great film to a nearly great one. It does not, however, interfere with our pleasure at seeing Pat Boone refer to Roger Smith as a "can-do kinda guy." Or diminish the epic silliness of the city's efforts to rescue Flint by turning it into a tourist center with the construction of a Hyatt Hotel, a shopping center and, as its biggest draw, a Disney World-type tribute to the auto industry called AutoWorld.
In "Roger & Me," Moore's brand of slapstick reportage strikes the perfect balance between irony and sincerity; it's slyly deadpan and committed, democratic and kingly all at once. In the end, though, he winds up giving ironic credence to the swells at the Great Gatsby party who advise the laid-off workers to get out there and do something. He's shown what one man with a camera crew and a vision can do.
domingo, 11 de septiembre de 2011
La batalla de Chile
domingo, 4 de septiembre de 2011
Colombia se estrena en cine 3D con un filme sobre los niños en el conflicto armado
La historia la narran cuatro menores de entre 8 y 13 años que relatan sus vivencias en el conflicto y aportan, además de su visión del problema, sus propios dibujos.
Por Efe
Y esas son las únicas voces que se escuchan, la de los niños, ya que los demás personajes, aunque existen, quedan mudos.
Ni una sola voz de adultos, ya sean de los familiares o de los miembros de las guerrillas, tienen cabida en esta película.
Para ello, Carrillo y su director adjunto, Oscar Andrade, realizaron 120 entrevistas y eligieron cuatro historias para el largometraje.
"Una de las cosas más importantes es que las historias no fueran repetitivas", explicó Carillo, al añadir que otro motivo esencial para elegirlas era que los niños pudieran explicarse de forma natural "porque puede haber historias que sean dramáticamente fuertes pero si el niño no es fluido entonces no podrían considerarse".
Y esto "porque lo importante es que son testimonios reales y eso es lo que le llega a la gente, que piense: lo que estoy escuchando sí pasó, no es ficción y no es un actor", aclaró.
La aventura que decidieron emprender en el mundo de las tres dimensiones se debe, explicó a Efe el director, a que es una forma más intensa de llegar al público, ya que éste puede meterse en primera persona en la película y en las acciones que se narran.
"Cuando estuvimos en (el festival de) Venecia con el largometraje (en dos dimensiones) pensamos, gracias a la reacción del público, cómo hacemos para que una película con consciencia social la gente la vea", agregó.
Y encontraron la solución: "Apareció Avatar en 3D y dijimos, ésta es la técnica que debemos mostrar para que la gente común y corriente vea esta película y que les llegue", explicó Carrillo.
El futuro de este proyecto está muy claro para él: "es una película hecha por un colombiano y para un público colombiano, para que se utilice como material educativo, que lo coja una ONG internacional y lo podamos distribuir en todas las escuelas, para que haya una reflexión", expresó.
En este sentido, Carrillo hizo referencia a la labor del presidente de Colombia: "Lo que está haciendo (Juan Manuel) Santos con la Ley de Víctimas es muy interesante y muy importante, que la sociedad acoja estas cosas y que los niños sepan que vivimos en un país con problemas pero con mucha esperanza".
Se refirió así a la Ley aprobada el pasado 10 de junio, por la que el Gobierno de Santos pretende resarcir a tres millones de víctimas del conflicto armado.
"Pequeñas voces" se estrenará en las salas de cine colombianas el 16 de septiembre después de haber pasado por importantes festivales cinematográficos internacionales como el de Berlín y Venecia.
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