Freedom and love are the themes of Tiger entrant Pedro González-Rubio's new feature Alamar. By Ben Walters
Ask Pedro González-Rubio where reality in his new film ends and fiction begins and the director of Alamar – which depicts a five-year-old boy's summer on the Mexican Caribbean coast with his fisherman father and grandfather and is one of this year's Tiger contenders – grows coy. “It's like asking a magician how he does his tricks!”
González-Rubio's previous feature, Toro Negro (IFFR 2006), which he co-directed with Carlos Armella, was a compelling documentary portrait of a charismatic, troubled young Mexican bullfighter. “Since Toro Negro dealt with frustration and hatred,” he says, “I wanted to flip the coin and portray freedom and love.”
Alamar is indeed very different. In a prologue, we learn that Italian Roberta Palombini and Mexican Jorge Machado enjoyed several years of happiness, including the birth of their son Natan, before separating. Now she plans to relocate to Rome and Natan will spend a final summer with his father and grandfather, Nestór, on the coral reef of Banco Chinchorro. Their time there is an idyll of swimming, building, fishing, playing and learning from and about nature; the film's main impetus was the threat to Banco Chinchorro from increased urbanisation.
“It's about freedom”, González-Rubio says of the story. “It's also about freedom in that it was a film I was able to do without having a crew of 20 or 100. It was just a friend of mine doing the sound and myself doing the camera. Like in Kerouac, what we show in the film is what I did with the characters. I slept the way they slept, in a hammock. I fished with them. I became part of the daily life and wrote it down with a camera.”
And what about that line between fact and fiction? “The background story is the story of these people,” he says, “but the farewell trip is part of the fiction. I said, 'Let's suppose the mother is taking him to Italy', so there was this feeling that they would be separated.”
González-Rubio had met Jorge Machado when Machado was working as a birdwatching guide at a nature reserve. He cast Nestór Marín, whom he had met a month earlier at Banco Chinchorro, as Jorge's father. “I was captured by his personality and his hospitality. When I met him, he offered me some homemade tortilla. When I heard him laugh I knew I needed him.”
The director then set parameters for the behaviour he would record. “I would plan what the activities would be and then they would develop them themselves naturally. Those situations are constructed, but the way they resolve them is documentary.”
Such blurring of boundaries seems organic, even unavoidable to González-Rubio. “In fiction, you always manipulate,” he says. But even in documentary, “putting a camera in front of a person always manipulates their reality. It's an impediment to letting reality shine. But this is my medium of expression. It's the only way at this moment that I can see myself communicating my experiences and my story.”
More on Alamar.