Juan Carlos Rulfo, the award-winning documentary director of In the Pit and Those Who Stay, was working on a television series when the pandemic started, interrupting his work. Now a new film, Letters from a Distance (Cartas a distancia), documents Mexico’s response to the Covid crisis through “distant letters” that track the crescendo of contagion over one week. It bows in Morelia’s Mexican documentary section.
The subject of the director’s TV mini-series 100 Years with Juan Rulfo is his famous father, the Mexican novelist whose “magical realism” launched the Latin American literary boom of the 1960s. In Letters Juan Carlos carries on that legacy, finding moments of magic among the heartbreak of a pandemic that isolates the most severe cases from their families. Nurses form a conga line to cheer up patients; a widow cooks her husband’s favorite meal and places it on a homemade altar. Life goes on, despite the grief; babies are born, a street vendor prepares ice cream cones for his customers; clothes need washing and hang out dry on the roof of a crumbling house. These moments of domestic routine gain new significance as we get to know the six families who struggle to survive disease and uncertainty in this timely documentary chronicle.
The main character is Jorge Gomez, a young male nurse, nicknamed Calavera (Skull). This unlikely hero reveals generous compassion beneath a tough, tattooed façade. He is both narrator and cinematographer, recording his rounds and his interactions with gravely ill patients on his hand-held phone. The Calavera is a potent symbol in Mexican art: from the Aztec pyramids to Diego Rivera’s murals, skulls allow Mexicans to live side by side with death and defy it in the face of despair. Other nurses are not as forgiving, as they get abused by neighbors who blame them for contagion. One nurse records a message against Covid deniers who refuse to wear masks. Rulfo and his defiant nurse turn the Calavera into a battle cry to rally afflicted patients and exhausted medics to fight together to combat the virus. The documentary is refreshingly honest, showing existential doubts and desperate denials, as people invoke or reject God, seek answers in science, or believe outrageous conspiracies on the internet.
Edited by Valentina Leduc Navarro, the film guides us along its ambitious scope with great pace and an eye for detail, never lingering to milk the tragedy, but moving the viewer to tears and deep emotion while keeping a respectful distance from the dying as well as from grieving survivors. DP Cesar Parra smoothly combines the rough, rushed hospital video recordings with sequences shot in the outside world.
American composer Philip Glass provides the music score, his piano and a soothing harp blending with the eerie sounds of a hospital ward, while rhythmic cascabeles (rattles) and labored human breathing lend a supernatural quality. It also allows us to heal from the more harrowing scenes and creates much-needed pauses in the narrative. Glass has expressed a profound interest in Mexican indigenous music and has performed his compositions in Mexico over the years. Here he collaborates with Leonardo Heiblum to provide new layers of emotion and help weave the stories together.
Rulfo helps us appreciate human compassion without becoming sentimental. He pieces together a puzzle of details that evoke a person’s life, from old still family photographs to a child’s drawing to the wobbly handwriting of a farewell letter. A poetic text by Jacaranda Correa is well-timed, her calm voice conveying a survivor’s perspective. The letters between patients and their loved ones are carefully chosen to convey the love and frayed hope of the people writing them, managing to be deeply personal as well as representative of a community, a country, and indeed a whole world in the midst of a pandemic. This is a necessary film that overcomes distance and helps us cope with anguish in the face of death, that smiling skull that permeates Mexican art.
Director: Juan Carlos Rulfo
Producers: Juan Carlos Rulfo, Eduardo Diaz Casanova, Melissa Del Pozo
Executive Producer: Gabriel Diaz Casanova
Cinematography: Cesar Parra, with additional cinematography by Juan Carlos Rulfo, Jorge Gomez “Calavera”, Javier Rosas Bustamante
Editing: Valentina Leduc Navarro
Music: Philip Glass, Leonardo Heiblum
Sound design: Martin Hernandez
Production companies and Sales: La Media Luna Producciones (Mexico), Peninsula Films (Mexico)
Venue: Morelia Film Festival (Mexican documentary)
In Spanish
78 minutes
