.){kind=link}
Bolivian director Kiro Russo returns to the Venice Film Festival scene with his second feature film, ‘El Gran Movimiento’ (English title: The Great Movement). This film takes place in his capital of Bolivia, La Paz, known for being the highest administrative capital in the world, 3,500m above sea level.
The film’s cinematography and editing heavily focuses on the La Paz’s mountains and city overview, detailing the rough city streets representing the third-world developing country. It’s based on present day, with a grainy vintage visual effect (possibly shot on 16mm camera) on the whole film which helps shape the feeling of how gloomy and dated the country is compared to other developed of the world. The characters focus on an elder, young miner, and Max, following their lives and the how the city environment affects their life within the society.
La Paz’s aerial views are shot beautifully from afar, but when the camera starts to focus on the Elder and miners, The Great Movement begins to show the grim realities of how they look exhausted from their hard labours that greatly affected their well-being, even to the extent of having to fight for reinstatement of their jobs. What makes this appealing is that the fights exude low energy yet peaceful protests just to earn what is potentially far below minimum wage just to survive another day.
The narrative and dialogue is very minimal as the film often takes shots of various parts of the city, while using multiple diverse characters to give reason for the locations shot in La Paz. Watching the mountains, construction, rough cities, the low quality of health care, and society trying their best to support each other brings such a very slow pace to the film so that the audience can experience the depressing nature of their daily lives.
Of course, with the minimal dialogue, there are some plots to help move The Great Movement along. At some point, Max (Max Eduardo Bautista Uchasara), a free-spirit who appears to harvest plants and herbs in the mountains of La Paz, gives reason of how quiet and peaceful the area is. Max would bring his harvests to the city to try to help the ruins of La Paz, but apparently the merchants have stopped believing in his ability to help society.
As for the young Miner, we see shots of him trying to earn a living helping with general hard labour of merchants around the city. The Miner looks physically exhausted, but continues to do all the heavy lifting, which appears to be the only skillset he has to make money. The issue is that all of his work is based on a handshake deal with no firm agreement as to how much he gets paid for the work he does. Often times, the Miner would argue with the merchants on how he is not getting paid enough for what he does, while the merchants feel that his lack of performance from his work is reflective of what he earned. The tug of war is very one-sided as the young Miner often seem to get the short end of the stick.
Some of the hard labour even put an interesting product placement, crates of Nike shoes with a swoosh logo. It appears that there are authentic shoes that are ready to be shipped out to developing countries, only to see the source of where the shoes were either in transit or produced from the city of La Paz. This contrast somewhat takes a shot of how large corporations find opportunities to “create jobs” in developing countries, only to witness how hard the labour is for producing shoes and shipping them, and in return how little the employees get paid for it.
There are also some strange inserts to The Great Movement which shows the young Miner’s deterioration of his mental state, to the point where a scene transitions to a music video featuring Bolivian dancers (including Max) dancing to some 80s cyberpunk techno pop. The feeling of this scene appears to indicate that his only source of his happy place is when he goes to clubs and dance. Though the dance itself presented itself as both fun and depressing at the same time. If that was the intention to make that feeling uncomfortable, it worked.
For the viewers, expect a slow drawn-out film when watching this. As mentioned, there is hardly much of a story, but more of a focus on the grim realities of what the young Miner goes through in his daily life. If you appreciate the idea of experiencing what it’s like to live in another mans shoes in La Paz, Bolivia, this one might be one to watch.