Aqui y Alla, a film by

Antonio Mendez Esparza (2012)

filmed in Copa, Guerrero, Estados Unidos Mexico

A film about immigration, home, and homelessness.

This film moved me and unsettled me.  I felt privileged to partake of this intimate portrayal of a young family living in the village of Copa in Guerrero, Mexico.  And, I felt equally privileged to listen in as after the showing director Antonio Esparza responded to questions via Skype.

The film is an art film, poetic realism.  If anything, it reminded me of something from the Maysles  brothers’ direct cinema, but even then, as an artistic feature that depicted real life, Aqui y Alla is an original that defies categorization

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Who knows why I also now draw a crude and ludicrous comparison, or rather, contrast, then, to the prevalent popular TV “reality” show, that highly manipulated, exploitative, and lucrative genre.  Maybe I do it because I think the question of exploitation in photography and film should always be examined, even in the case of Aqui y Alla.  Maybe I do it because I can’t help but wonder if the family portrayed in this film was exploited. Isn’t photography, isn’t film always exploitative? Or was this as pure an effort at filming people’s lives as filming can get?  Veritas.  Truth. 

 

That concern aside, I was moved not only by the particulars of these people and their circumstances, but by a central theme, the “here and there,” the brokenness, a feeling akin to homelessness that arises out of both social conditions (responsibility of systems of society such as government) and individual circumstances within the social conditions (responsibility of individuals).  For where there is poverty, there is a desire to get out of poverty.  People have dreams for themselves and their children.

Many men and women leave Mexico (as well as parts of the world the world over) to survive, or to pursue money, to make money to send home, to get a little bit ahead, to save money to build a house.  Not all people are fleeing violence, though many are.  Others leave to become something more than they are, to surmount the oppression of social conditions. They want personal freedom. They may dream of success. These are universal themes.  

But this human desire manifests in honorable and dishonorable forms, good and evil forms.  How many men leave Mexico because they feel entrapped by the responsibility and/or thwarted by their failure of supporting family there?  How many men leave and don’t return?  Perhaps they find new lives, and “wives,” on the other side and once "across," the geographical and political divide is formidable.  And this brings me to Pedro, husband and father portrayed in the film. In a way the portrayal of the protagonist in the film seemed a little too simple.  If I could find any fault with this film it would be in its failure to develop a more complicated portrayal of Pedro.  But motives can be hard to untangle, and only Pedro really knows, as well as, perhaps, the director. 

Even if the portrayal was part artifice, a director’s construct, or a portrayal of a man who really and truly wanted to stay home, it is in the end a director's prerogative—a choice to develop the story thus—in the case of Aqui y Alla, a story at once tragic and somehow also idyllic, a dichotomy of an idyllic home in which father is good and no home at all, a gap of yearning between here and there.

I love realism in literature, and in art modern abstraction and sometimes impressionism.  So, it is I love the poetic and intimate realism of this film that crosses genre and has no neat definition. I only hope the experience of opening themselves to the making of the film helped this family and this  village. That is, I hope the film brought lasting value.  For dream-like moments of fame can bring difficult disillusionment later.  Unless there are tangible, lasting improvements and real growth, the dream may end and the film remain. And if that is so, I hope the film itself is enough.  Art for art's sake.