Producers from Peru, Mexico, France, Brazil, Chile, Dominican Republic and Venezuela joined hands on Zafari, a rather amazing 7-country coproduction centered around a hippo who arrives to brighten up a depopulated zoo, while all around him the human beings starve. The ironies are stark but the choices facing the characters are even grimmer – scavenge for food or leave the country. Writer-director Mariana Rondon, who won San Sebastian Golden Shell in 2013 for her character drama Bad Hair (Pelo Malo), returns to the festival in the Horizontes Latinos section with this dismaying fable that lays bare the situation of dire poverty, hunger and violence that have forced so many families to abandon their homes and seek a life elsewhere.
The air of unreality that engulfs the characters can’t hide how close these horrors are to real life. Though the country is never named, it seems most obviously Venezuela, where the UN has recently reported 82% of the population lives in poverty and 53% in extreme poverty, without enough food to eat. As a result, nearly 8 million Venezuelans have fled the country. But Honduras, Nicaragua and El Salvador, who also contribute numerous asylum-seekers to the U.S., are not far behind in economic troubles. While Zafari is not a social-thesis film – if anything it tends towards uneasy horror and hidden fears of what lies behind the closed doors of empty apartments, where strange noises are heard — Rondon’s view of her native country’s social, economic and political decline offers a privileged glimpse into a disaster that many are tempted to turn away from.
Ana (Chilean actress Daniela Ramirez) and Francisco (Venezuela’s Francisco Denis) live with their son (played as a typically impenetrable, self-centered teenage boy by Varek La Rosa) in a gracious, modern, low-rise apartment building carved out of the tropical jungle. Its main boast is a large communal swimming pool that none of the less-ritzy neighboring high-rises have. For these middle-class homeowners, the struggle begins over the right to use the pool by their lower-class neighbors.
Francisco, a nervous and inherently weak man, angrily watches the invasion of the plebs through his binoculars. He marches the family down for a confrontation that boomerangs in embarrassed smiles. In a dangerous act of political demagoguery, it seems a city official has put the poor Romeros in charge of the care and feeding of a huge hippopotamus that has just been transferred to an adjacent zoo; ergo they have clout and their wishes must be respected. In a funny concession, the families agree to time-share the pool. And their kids get on fabulously.
Meanwhile, all is not well in the city. Violent motorcycle gangs race, unseen, past the complex. The electricity keeps going off for weeks at a time and there is so little water (most goes to filling the pool) that Ana needs to fill containers from a fountain outside. Nobody has a job and there is no food in the house. And all their well-to-do neighbors are packing the essentials and leaving the country. Ana collects their keys in the name of the “homeowners’ association”; later, she guiltily scavenges the cupboards for anything edible, in growing desperation. She is thin from malnutrition and food has become an obsession.
Rondon restricts the action to a handful of apartments, the pool outside and, just beyond an invisible barrier, a muddy part of the zoo where the absurdly superfluous hippo has his own pool to enjoy all by himself. At first he is shoveled a generous diet of watermelon and vegetables; later the Romeros stop feeding him. The street-wise, down-to-earth mother (played with gritty humor by Samantha Castillo from Bad Hair), who sometimes barters with Ana, gives her three slice of watermelon and advises her to remove the seeds and roast it: it tastes just like meat.
Director, screenplay: Mariana Rondon
Cast: Daniela Ramirez, Francisco Denis, Samantha Castillo, Claret Quea, Juan Carlos Colombo, Varek La Rosa, Beto Benites, Ali Rondon
Producers: Marité Ugas, Cristina Velasco, Juliette Lepoutre, Rafael Sampaio, Giancarlo Nasi, Sterlyn Ramirez, Mariana Rondon
Cinematography: Alfredo Altamirano
Editing: Isabela Monteiro de Castro
Music: Pauchi Sasaki
Sound: Lena Esquenazi
Production companies: Sudaca Films (Peru), Paloma Negra Films (Mexico), Still Moving (France), Klaxon Cultura Auiovisual (Brazil), Quijote Film (Chile), Selene Films (Dominican Republic), Artefactos SF (Venezuela)
World Sales: Feelsales (Spain)
Venue: San Sebastian Film Festival (Horizontes Latinos)
In Spanish
100 minutes
