Spain's Oscar contender set in Bolivia
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The latest film by Spanish director Iciar Bollain, set in Bolivia and starring internationally renowned Mexican actor Gael Garcia Bernal and a talented new Bolivian actor called Juan Carlos Aduviri, is Spain's official entry to the 2011 Academy Awards in the Best Foreign Language Film category.
The film, Tambien la lluvia (Even the Rain), is about the making of another movie in Bolivia, on Christopher Columbus, a man obsessed with gold.
It is the year 2000, and suddenly the ancient tale of strife between conquerors and indigenous people gets caught up in a modern-day rebellion in Bolivia involving water prices. History repeats itself.
Garcia Bernal plays the modern-day film director and Spain's Luis Tosar, the producer. Filmed in the Chapare forest and Cochabamba, more than 4,000 extras were called in for Even the Rain, among them 300 native Indians.
When he arrived in Cochabamba, Garcia Bernal said that, "Bolivia is a cauldron at boiling point ready to tell many stories. There is latent energy here".
This is the fifth feature film for Bollain after her work on four other movies, such as the award-winning Te Doy Mis Ojos (For You My Eyes).
The story in Even the Rain is more complex.
"We touch on that law that did not allow the use of resources and did not allow citizens to collect rainwater. Thus the statement made by the Bolivian protagonist that 'they even take the rain from us' - that gave the film it's name," Bollain says.
"We wanted to tell an inspiring story. In a sense, water is equivalent to gold in the 21st century."
To get inside the skin of the leader of the 2000 revolt against the privatization of Bolivia's water supply, Juan Carlos Aduviri did not look for models among the great performers, as other actors would have done.
Instead, this Bolivian who acquitted himself well in his big screen debut alongside such cinematic leading lights as Tosar and Garcia Bernal, looked only to his country, remembering his own experiences in the gas wars of 2003.
It is a performance that has been widely praised, since the film first premiered at the Toronto International Film Festival in early 2010.
He won the Best Actor award at the Les Arcs European Film Festival in December and has been shortlisted for Best Revelation Actor for the Goya prizes, awarded by the Spanish Academy for Cinematic Arts and Sciences.
"I was very excited, I couldn't believe it," he says of being shortlisted for the Goya. "The Goya usually goes to established actors, directors, producers," he adds, noting that it was the first time that a Bolivian had been so honored.
And for that honor to go him "seems like something out of a fantasy", he says.
Written by Paul Laverty, who has scripted some 10 screenplays for British filmmaker Ken Loach, Even the Rain tells the story of a Spanish film crew intent on making a revisionist movie about Columbus' conquest of the New World.
A casting call for extras draws more people than expected, particularly as the earnings are a princely $2 per day.
Daniel (Aduviri) gains the attention of the director Sebastian (Garcia Bernal) and he is cast as Hatuey, the leader of a rebellion against the Spanish.
Daniel himself, it later turns out, is one of the leaders of the water war revolt and the subsequent juxtaposition of the two battles, one, 500 years old, and the other, quite current, challenges the belief system of Sebastian and his crew.
Even the Rain blurs the line between fact and fiction, between past and present, with deep textual layers and parallel narratives that highlight the continued exploitation of Latin America.
Even the Rain was well received at the Lincoln Center's 19th edition of its popular Spanish Cinema Now series in late 2010. It premiered in Spain on Jan 7.
On Jan 19, the Oscar committee announced it was on the shortlist of nine films out of the 66 nominations that advance to the next round of voting in the Foreign Language Film category.
No date has yet been set for its Bolivian premiere.
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