Of A Stunning Debut And Dead Weights

His film ‘Las Acacias’ received an uproarious standing ovation from the MAMI crowd. But Argentinean director Pablo Giorgelli left them on the verge of tears with his admission, “I don’t think I’ll recover money.” No big deal really, unless you consider that his film won three prizes at Cannes this year, including the Golden Camera and for cinema enthusiasts globally, represents one of the most stunning debuts in the last few years.

If this be the fate of such a beautiful, moving and celebrated film, what hope do others have?

“It took me five years to make ‘Las Acacias’, taking money from wherever I could. It will be nice if I can recover and pay back the money,” he told IANS later, a little introspective for his kind, jovial face.

And if you look at it this way, ‘Las Acacias’ is indeed ironically metaphoric for most film viewers and distributors. This road movie, tells a simple story of the relationship between a truck driver who is ferrying a woman with a five month old baby across the borders of Paraguay and Argentina, a huge cache of lumber loaded on the truck.  

The lumber behind the truck is a metaphor of the dead weights both the characters are carrying in their subconscious, the ghosts of their sad pasts. It can also be seen as the dead weight of film-clichés and expectations that the audiences and distributors worldwide carry that will not allow “one of the most accomplished debuts in history”, as veteran film critic Rashid Irani said of this film, to recover its money.

Yet, one of the most hopeful films in the circuit this year, there is a metaphor in its hope as well. The five month old baby who is always happy and cheerful and carries no past baggage, wins over the reticent truck driver. It is one of the cutest and funniest babies you will see in cinema history of whom Pablo Giorgelli told IANS, “It was a miracle that we found the baby, barely a month before shooting began.” The baby is perhaps a simile for a new kind of audience, young folks who are yet untouched by the past of filmmaking or its clichés.

These new generation of viewers don’t need to know that this film took five years of painful birth pangs to be born, or that the casting for the mere 3 characters that predominate the film took a whooping one and a half year, or the many prizes it has won globally or that the director exorcised his own demons by stripping off layers and layers of unwanted scenes and dialogues to bring before his audience a truly polished gem. All they need to know and believe in is what they see in on screen.

In a quiet, subtle and dignified way, the two protagonists in their hesitant interaction at the climax discard their dead weights. Hope the audiences and film industries globally could do the same for those like Pablo Giorgelli. After all there cannot be good cinema without good and evolved viewers.

“Acacias in Spanish means ‘dead wood’,” Pablo explains the name of his film before signing off.

This feature story has been written for the wire service, IANS (Indo-Asian News Service).