Film Festival Film #1: Marimbas From Hell

The programming person who introduced the film said that the festival hadn't shown a Central American film in a while. This little film from Guatemala was charming and fairly rough. The film was originally intended to be a mockumentary, but morphed into a more traditional narrative film during the making. The seams of those two styles were sometimes apparent. The director also tends to use non-professional actors and an improvisational directorial style. Then end result is not a slick film in the Hollywood vein.

But the boundaries between the real and the fictional are sometimes confusing. Don Alfonso, the main "character" really was a Marimba player who was being extorted by a local gang. That background item was drawn on a few times in the course of the film.

The plot is fairly simple: Don Alfonso is a marimba player -- the Marimba being a musical instrument much like a xylophone. Appreciation for the marimba has declined considerably, and Don Alfonso hasn't been getting very many gigs. And he's concerned about the people who are threatening him. He's afraid to leave his marimba anywhere, for fear that this gang is going to destroy it. So he drags it around with him.

And then he hooks up with his god-son, Chiquilin, a glue-sniffing layabout. Chiquilin hooks Don Alfonso up with a safe space to crash (and store his marimba). But it's through Chiquilin that Don Alfonso meets up with Blacko, a former performer in heavy metal bands. What can breathe new life into the marimba more than heavy metal?

So they work on getting a band together. Much of the enjoyment of the film originates in some hilarious conversations between the characters. Blacko has to explain that he can't rehearse on Saturdays because it's the Sabbath, and they get into a conversation about religion. Blacko, you see, used to be a Satanist, but that didn't work out for him. Then he became an evangelical, but his band lost all of its fans. "I thought: that's okay. I'll just get some Christian fans." But apparently the heavy metal wasn't a big hit with the Christians. Now he's studying the Torah. Completely weird scene. Another scene has Chiquilin going to a government office looking for some arts funding. The government official seems interested in the idea of a heavy metal band with a marimba player, but he starts asking about genre: is it more gothic metal, or death metal? Perhaps a bit of death metal gospel? Chiquilin, of course, has no knowledge of these genres.

And there are elements of The Bicycle Thief as well. To impress a girl, Chiquilin ends up stealing the marimba and pawning it, putting a serious crimp in the band. At times, you just want to thump him.

Charming, slice-of-life-y, and sometimes downright odd.

Strange activism conversations

I was talking to the woman sitting beside me at the theatre last night. We were playing the "what are you seeing?" game. Me, I mentioned that I was seeing Windfall. She said that she didn't want to see that one.

Her: "I'm not too fond of Israel at the moment. I disagree with what they're doing to the Palestinians."

Me: "I don't think it's an Israeli film. I'm pretty sure it's American. About a town in upper New York state, I think."

Her: "It's just terrible what they're doing over there."

Me (remembering): "Actually, I think the director's name is Israel. Not the country of origin. It doesn't have anything to do with Israel."

Her: "Well, I skipped that film."

Lest we forget

Today is the 22nd anniversary of the Sen Jan Bosko (St. Jean Bosco) massacre. On September 11th, 1988, a group (possibly former Tonton Makout) attacked Sen Jan Bosko church in an attempt to assassinate or terrorize its priest, then-Fr. Jean Bertrand Aristide. Aristide was increasingly identified as a major figure within the pro-democracy movement that opposed the dictatorships in Haiti and had, by that point, survived several assassination attempts.

Exactly five years after the fact, at an anniversary commemoration, Antoine Izméry was dragged out of Mass and assassinated in front of a crowd of people. Louis-Jodel Chamblain, the second-in-command of the death squad, FRAPH -- an organization formed with the encouragement and financial backing of the CIA and DIA -- was convicted in-absentia of the assassination. After the 2004 coup, Chamblain was retried under the so-called "interim government" installed by Canada, the US, and France and acquitted.

Antoine Izméry's former home now functions as Matthew 25 House.