02 · 22 · 24

Vallejo, Schroeder, and Herzog in Morelia

Rafael Aviña

Beyond the impact it would have on the national and worldwide film scene, and in the development of new audiences and filmmakers, the first Morelia International Film Festival (FICM) will also be remembered for the presence of three exceptional guests. A trio of filmmakers-writers that sponsored an unprecedented event.  Moreover, being its first edition, the festival was a small and intimate event. Therefore, meeting and mingling with such prestigious personalities as the Colombian naturalized Mexican Fernando Vallejo, the Swiss-Iranian Barbet Schroeder, and the German Werner Herzog, was surprising and instructive, just like the conversation with the public offered by the director of Barfly (1987) and the author of Aguirre, the Wrath of God (1974) which took place in perfect Spanish and was moderated by our dear colleague Carlos Bonfil in October 2003.

Shortly before, in 2000, Barbet Schroeder was directing Our Lady of the Assassins. This was a controversial independent film with unknown actors. It was inspired by Fernando Vallejo’s ruthless autobiographical novel on the “sicariato” (criminal activity that offers remuneration in exchange for providing the service of killing another person), which attracted ignorant youngsters eager to live well and fast. It was filmed on Medellín’s violent streets with a high-definition digital camera. Vallejo’s adaptation turned to a realistic thriller about a social epidemic that mirrored the reality at that time of several Latin American countries, like México.

 

The story of Fernando (Germán Jaramillo), a mature and sophisticated homosexual writer who returns to his native Colombia after several years and falls in love with a teenage hitman who lives off prostitution, in a film that blends rawness and emotional tenderness. Twenty-three years earlier, in December 1977, Fernando Vallejo debuted as a filmmaker and screenwriter in México —the country he had been exiled to in 1971— with Crónica roja [Red Chronicle] (1977), filmed in Veracruz. Although it narrated events that took place in Colombia in the late 1940s, it created a simile with our country (Mexico) in those years, and at the time it was filmed, by detailing the criminal upsurge of two brothers (Gerardo Vigil and Mario Saavedra). One of them is imprisoned, accused of murdering two customs agents, and later, on the run. This leads them to a path full of blood, paranoia, and persecution under the newspapers’ red chronicles that extol their criminal career.

Vallejo won the Ariel for Best First Work with this raw portrait that resolves scenes of violence and street confrontations with terrifying coldness, as shown in the film's climactic sequence, in a country with social tension on the verge of exploding as was happening at the time with the so-called "Mexican Dirty War" while avoiding moral judgment on those wasted youthful lives. Vallejo would later film En la tormenta [In the Storm] (1980), also set in Colombia in times of violence in the 1950s; Barrio de campeones [Neighborhood of Champions] (1981), a melodrama filmed in Tepito, and Fragmentos de amor [Fragments of Love] (2016), an intimate and sensual chronicle.
 

 

Barbet Schroeder is a former critic at Cahiers du Cinema, philosopher by profession and producer of: Eric Rohmer, Jacques Rivette, Marguerite Duras and Wim Wenders. He chose the excesses of drugs and crime in More (1968), which featured a soundtrack by Pink Floyd.  In The Valley (1972), an ambassador's wife joins a hippie commune in New Guinea. General Idi Amin Dada (1974) explored the narcissistic personality of the Ugandan dictator. Masochistic sex was the theme of Maitresse (1975), with Gérard Depardieu and Bulle Ogier, and the obsession with gambling in Les Tricheurs (1983). In 1987, he filmed writer Charles Bukowski’s intense portrait in Barfly, with Mickey Rourke and Faye Dunaway.

Crime, justice, and suspense were the themes of Reversal of Fortune (1990), Single White Female (1992), Kiss of Death (1995), Before and After (1996), Desperate Measures (1998), The Virgin of the Assassins (2000), and Murder by Numbers (2002), Terror's Advocate (2007), or Amnesia (2015). He shows a sober, elegant, and personal style in his work, avoiding Hollywood formulas as much as possible.
 

 

Finally, Werner Herzog represents one of the summits of the new German cinema that emerged in the late sixties. He is also responsible for one of the most bulky and atypical filmographies —more than 70 titles—exploring the dementia of society, the delirium of extreme characters, or the power of nature, as shown in some of his most significant works: Even Dwarfs Started Small, The Enigma of Gaspar Hauser, Heart of Glass, Invincible, Bad Lieutenant or Grizzly Man, as well as his disturbing portraits of enigmatic and mysterious personalities, victims of his own obsessions, starring Klaus Kinski: Aguirre, the Wrath of God, Woyzek, Nosferatu, Fitzcarraldo, Cobra Verde or My Dearest Enemy.