IFF: Another take on water rights and injustice

By Katherine Monahan

A major award winning film scheduled for Panama’s International Film Festival could leave you wondering how far we have traveled along the road to eliminate injustice in Latin America.

Even the Rain is a Spanish-Bolivian political drama starring Gael García Bernal (The Motorcycle Diaries, Amores Perros) as a passionately idealistic young Mexican director, who talks his producer Costa (Luis Tosar) into making a film about Columbus’s conquest of the American Indians.

In the first of a series of uncomfortable parallels between historical and present-day injustice, Costa decides to make the film in Bolivia, because there they can save money by hiring indigenous actors for low wages.

Tensions rise as the filmmakers discover that Daniel, the Indian they've cast in the role of the Taíno rebellion leader, is actually a leader in the contemporary native struggle for water rights.  Clashes between the indigenous Bolivians and the police threaten to interrupt the filming of key battles between Colombus and the Taínos, and past and present overlap, in this stirring, eye-opening drama about friendship and conscience.

Winner of the Berlin Film Festival, and recipient of the Ariel Awards, the Cinema Writers’ Circle Awards, Goya Awards, European Film Awards, and the Latin ACE Awards, Even the Rain plays April 28 at the Cinemark Multiplex as part of the International Film Festival.  Like all 50 films, it will be subtitled in English.

For more summaries and trailers, click the Entertainment Box and then Films.