El Gran Movimiento’s haunting vision of Bolivian exploited workers told through a mythological and mysterious narrative, makes it the most singular film of the Orizzonti section of the 78th Biennale di Venezia.
The 78th Venice International Film Festival, organised by La Biennale di Venezia and directed by Alberto Barbera, opened on September 1st with Pedro Almodóvar’s Madres Paralelas. Like every year, the festival is take place at Venice Lido, and will be live until September 11th, 2021. As part of this year’s program, we have delved into the Orizzonti Competition, where we have spotted El Gran Movimiento by Kiro Russo, revolving around the following themes: a symphony of the city in the heights, the illness of a worker, the nightmare and his redemption.
Kiro Russo opens his new film, El Gran Movimiento, with slow pans and zooms of cluttered buildings, cable cars, and landscape of the city of El Alto, Bolivia (in the suburbs of La Paz). Traveling from these cable cars to the city, showing messy power lines, distorted mirror images of the everyday, layered with ominous music, transporting us viewers to a ghostly world as told through this capitalist society. A story of three men doing any work just to have enough to live, focuses on Elder, ill figure who’s blacking out mysteriously coming in and out of life. El Gran Movimiento was the only film to be aesthetically and narratively ambitious in the Orizzonti section and was also selected in the Currents program of the 2021 New York Film Festival, as well as in the Official Selection of the 2021 San Sebastian International Film Festival.
“I wanted to make a film about La Paz with characters who could provide a singular point of view upon the city.”
The three workers: Elder, Gato, and Gallo, go through the daily activities of hustling for work, whether it be temporary jobs in the street market, construction, mining, etc. and spend the nights excessively drinking, passing out on the streets, and discussing how they’ll figure out how they’ll get the money for the next day. This crew is virtually unnoticed from almost anyone outside workers. One night, Elder (who is also called Elder by the guys) keeps blacking out and gets noticed by a strange woman who mistakes him for her godson. When the strange woman tries to help out Elder, more and more supernatural events occur. The mysteriousness of Elder with Russo’s constant slow zoom imagery of the city, industrial, and urban landscape of Bolivia depicts the city as a ghost town for these workers.
The film then introduces us to the outskirts of the city into the forest and Max. Max, the typical looking homeless man, speaks of philosophical non-sense to himself and others. He treks to the city and talks to the produce workers and they think of him as a drunk, but has this secretive side to him. He meets the strange woman known as Mama Pancha who we meet earlier and speak of the history and changes of the city. Russo continues to show the changes of the city by the destruction of old buildings, for new, while having Max be a guide to the death of the city he once knew. In parallel, Elder is becoming weaker, not suited for work, and continues to faint. The city is beginning to look like a ghostly landscape through Elder and Max’s lives and once they meet, a transfixing moment occurs that explores life “flashing before you die”. The repetition of the past and past lives leaves an impression of souls wandering throughout this city, using the bodies of these new workers coming from the outside to repeat the same cycle of work and death.
Russo’s unique vision is one to behold and is very much so incomparable to the rest of the films in the Orizzonti section. When the Orizzonti’s statement is that it is “dedicated to films that represent the latest aesthetic and expressive trends”, El Gran Movimiento, is so far, the only film in the section that comes close to that statement. Visually, its use of nighttime darkness to block certain scenes creates an aesthetical mood piece and many metaphorical visuals using the landscapes of the city and mountainsides alone makes this film a standout. Overall, its singular vision from its mythological storytelling to experimental filmmaking is what makes its slim plot become an artistic piece of work. Its metaphorical and literal breathtaking conclusion caps the vision of Bolivian workers and their haunted history of exploitation and damage.
