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La estación seca (2018)
A Cornerstone of Post-Modern Panamanian Cinema
Like all emergent national cinemas, the Panamanian needs a set of foundational and comprehensive works, requires critics and historians to demarcate miracles and hierarchies, requires cultural and institutional support to stimulate the existence of works that define something as intangible as the "Panamanian", and illustrate what it means to inhabit the isthmus and the possible cinematographic responses to the eternal questions of who we are and where we are going. "La estación seca" (The Dry Season), which was shot between 2006 and 2008, and recently premiered in festivals, gives a decisive and surprising response to many different aesthetic and conceptual summaries, for it is a key movie as idiosyncratic portrait, gentle and symbolic docu-fiction experiment, and cinéma vérité set many light years apart of the televised pro-government strabismus, a love letter to what deserves to be saved in a country, as in many other territories in this 21st century, where the drought of opportunities for youth, art and beauty has prolonged too long.
It is possible that the above statement seems excessive to some viewers, perhaps confused by the native, almost folkloric machismo that the film exposes, or the colloquialism and relaxed tone of a funny "work in progress." Some may even be blinded by the meticulous self-referentiality of the three protagonists and their mentor (José Ángel Canto, Wladímir Uliantzeff and Edgar Soberón Torchia play alter egos very close to their personal biographies) and think that it is a little more than a joke between friends. It is probable that some may get dizzy by the doubtful nomadism of some of its young protagonists, but "The Dry Season" talks about beauty and its peremptory erosion; it speaks about young persons full of talent, strength and potential that find no space to participate in the construction of the nation and the design of the future. And, in the final analysis, the film also discusses the inability of our countries (Latin American, underdeveloped Third World) to accumulate experiences, stand on our feet and walk firmly with a defined course in cultural, artistic and also economic and political terms.
So, the title "The Dry Season" epitomizes the will of the filmmakers (director, screenwriter, photographer and editor) to capture snapshots of a reality in a trance. Although it should be noted that, luckily, the political and social questions are not thrown like slaps to the viewer, but they are subtly intercalated in a narrative built from the experiences and dialogues of these three young people: a recently graduated filmmaker, a tour guide and his sister, who was a surf champion and now is unemployed, seduced, pregnant and abandoned. Besides these, there are three characters that contribute to the conceptual density of the project: first, there is Omar, the mentor who shares a house with the other protagonists and who seems to represent a sort of gnoseological guide that young people need, although not even they know; the character played by Edgar Soberón embodies the intellectual coherence, the wisdom that is known to be threatened by the proximity of death and, therefore, has the disposition to tell the truth because he feels like it, openly, honestly, without any taboos.
There is also the indigenous Iguandili, a friend of Omar, who confers a curious historical-anthropological background to the film, and Tita, the grandmother of the young filmmaker, who is a painter and therefore justifies being the only character surrounded by colorful elements in the whole movie, conceived in black and white. She does not say a single word throughout 55 minutes of footage, constantly absorbed in her paintings, in the contemplation of the ugliness and disintegration of the environment. For her persistence and expressive silences, for her breakup with contingency and because of the suggestive colors that enhance her presence in the frame, the grandmother could represent nothing less than the beauty and freedom that we all inherit, these two conditions that disregard opportunistic sanity, accounts and contracts, and that only ask to breathe and kindly cohabitate with us. The characters of the grandmother and Omar are complementary, just as freedom and knowledge are complemented by beauty.
Now that Panamanian growing industry is focused on taking advantage of the Law of Cinema and state funds for audiovisual promotion, it is time to recognize the foundational and illuminating character of "The Dry Season", an honest, pleasant and beautiful film, that is able to update the cinema of this nation, reconciling the obsessions of modernity (attention to the social and political context, great stories of national relevance, breakup with tradition based on the principles of originality and novelty) with the imperatives of post-postmodernism, in terms of hedonism and atomization, adventitious rhizome and inclusive relativity.
The director, co-writer, producer and actor José Ángel Canto, together with co-writer, executive producer and also actor Édgar Soberón Torchia, and the leading actor and co-writer Wladímir Uliantzeff display the lucidity and enthusiasm of the pioneers when it comes to offering a definite vision of the world that asks existential questions and plays with the chronicle of the absurd. The three of them, helped by Jeico Castro Ferrari's beautiful cinematography and Aldo Rey Valderrama's just film editing for the fragmented story, rediscovered the art of filling each shot significantly, always taking into account the visual possibilities of the medium and the indelible intention to relate faces and landscapes, psychologies and contexts, so that "The Dry Season" becomes nothing more and nothing less than a cornerstone of Panamanian visual memory, since the national reality is seen through its most characteristic images.
Panamá Radio (2019)
«PANAMÁ RADIO» AND THE SMILING NOSTALGIA OF A WHOLE COUNTRY
Subversive and iconoclastic, surely unintentionally, with respect to the prestigious tradition of the Latin American memory documentary (mostly concentrated on larceny, dictatorships and great political ills) «Panamá Radio» offers 60 minutes of cordial and fresh remembrance of an era (the sixties up the eighties) and a city, and a nation that has changed a lot, for bad and for good, throughout all these years, especially the urban landscape surrounding the 5 de Mayo Square, which was the center of Panamá City.
While the viewers are informed, and inevitably compare the Panamá of before with its present situation, they also enjoy the charisma and the ability for fluid and essential conversation of the two main characters: Dora de Ángeles and Lydia García, two friends who worked at the music store called Panamá Radio, located on the 5 de Mayo, and who remember their youth before the camera, when they lived surrounded by music and the stars that visited the store.
Maybe I should have written that there are three main characters and not two, because the sympathetic duo of nostalgic but never melancholic old women is joined by the director, screenwriter and interviewer Édgar Soberón Torchia, responsible for evoking, from the first minutes, the reasons that encouraged him to rediscover this story of a record store that was much more than just that.
When talking about the main characters, and "the voices" that occupy most of the considerable body of references and information, it should be added that none of the sixty minutes of the documentary is dedicated to onanistic self-referentiality, so much in vogue in this kind of projects: the director points out the reasons that link his personal history with the subject of the documentary, but «Panamá Radio» is, in any case, neither a film about the director, nor it is only related to his personal memories or appreciations. Closer to this type of autobiographical meditations is the excellent feature film, also seen at the International Film Festival (IFF) of Panamá in 2019, «The Dry Season», in which Edgar plays, as an actor, a character that is very close to himself, and participates in several confessional scenes, closely linked to the aesthetic that animates that project.
«Panamá Radio» would not need intimate disquisitions, since the film is rather a fascinating juxtaposition of photographic testimonies, musical fragments and funny anecdotes certainly linked to the history of a place, of a barrio, and such a story is left in the hands, above all, of the two protagonists, two women whose contrasts of temperament and expression remember, with local spontainety, the "buddy movies" of the most acute comic spirit. They shore up the joyful heart of this privileged documentary, as well as José Alonso's effective cinematography, as he moves with equal skill while chasing his characters through the narrow streets of the old neighborhood, or when he contemplates them in the tranquility of their domestic spaces. Appreciable dexterity also supports the editing of Aldo Rey Valderrama, a professional who is very aware that the narrative rhythm and the codes of causality, characterization and suspense can and should also be found in documentary or testimonial works such as this one.
«Panamá Radio» is made with the awareness that solemnity and transcendentalism will never be the only ways to build knowledge and rescue heritage. Luckily for its many and enthusiastic spectators, the film, although made from the perspective of nostalgia and remembrance, is never tear-jerking or pessimistic, because it transmits, instead, some confidence in the values of the simple people, the people. As a result it also communicates the joyful feeling that culture and art can be created from the humblest strata of public servants, those who fulfill the socially cohesive function of entertaining the nation, and disclosing its great values, not only local, but of the entire area, as it refers to the passage through the famous record shop of artists from Cuba, Spain, Puerto Rico, México, and of many other countries.
If the Panamanian cinema is offering clear signs of progress, year after year, and it is possible to verify them in the IFF Panamá, we are in front of a work that is a remarkable example of such a boom and that also indicates a feasible way to continue with the essential illustration of the national idiosyncrasy and history. The most significant thing is that we can fulfill this important task by combining the simple and the wise, emotional warmth and intellectual maturity, the entire balance sustained by a grace that we should never tire of celebrating.