INTERVIEW: Bolivian drama ‘Utama’ puts family at center of climate crisis
Photo: Utama tells the story of a couple living in the Bolivian highlands and how they are facing the dire consequences of a drought. Photo courtesy of Film Forum press site / Provided with permission.
No doubt there’s an important place in the world for scientific studies and statistical numbers that accurately predict the current and future calamities that are chiefly due to climate change. However, to inspire action and empathy, filmmakers are taking a different route toward spreading the climate message. Case in point: the new Bolivian drama Utama, written and directed by Alejandro Loayza Grisi, and now playing at New York City’s Film Forum.
The new film follows a Quechua couple who live and work in the Bolivian highlands, outside of La Paz, the administrative capital of the country. They are farmers, working with their hands and passing down traditions from generation to generation, but a devastating drought is disrupting their harvest, and their grandson is considering leaving the highlands for the job security of the city.
“It began around early ‘17,” Loayza Grisi said about the early days of the project. “I was writing many ideas. I wanted to write a feature film. I was trying to figure out which idea was better, and I had a couple short synopses. And I showed them to my brother, who is the producer, and he thought that Utama was going to be the best one to develop. So I started writing, and I did it in a photographic way since I come from photography. I wrote scene by scene, just bullet points and very photographic.”
From those early storyboards and brainstorming sessions, Loayza Grisi developed Utama into an 87-minute film in Quechua and Spanish, with English subtitles. The project came naturally to him because he is familiar with the Bolivian highlands; he actually grew up in nearby La Paz.
“I traveled a lot during the last 10 years,” he said. “I traveled always once a year or two times a year or three times a year to Lake Titicaca, and [I was] always passing by the highlands and always seeing it. La Paz is a city that is made out of migrants from the highlands mainly. The main population are migrants from the highlands, so it influences our culture in the city. And then I was able to travel all around Bolivia doing a documentary series, and I went to this other region of the highlands because the highlands are very big. This is more in the south, and I started spending time there to do the research for the film because I already had the idea in mind. We already started developing it, so we made a couple trips there.”
Because this is Loayza Grisi’s feature-length fiction debut, he was excited to kickstart the project and test his skills with the cast and crew. Of course, behind that excitement was some nervousness, but he rid himself of that feeling by preparing, preparing, preparing.
“I think during the first week of rehearsals I was nervous because it was scary that [the cast members] were not responding at first, but I was not understanding that it was going to be a long process,” the filmmaker said. “And then eventually it started working, but for the first day, we had it all so very planned that I just arrived very excited with a lot of energy to just start and get going. I feel very confident in myself and my work, so I was really calm.”
One of the professional relationships that Loayza Grisi cherished the most was with cinematographer Barbara Alvarez, whose evocative imagery in Utama is startling and picturesque. For long stretches, there is no dialogue, and it’s Alvarez’s scene-setting and the striking beauty of the highlands that take over.
“Working with her was really great,” the director said. “She’s a great professional, a great person. She has a great and different sensitivity, and she’s very generous. So she was backing me up because it was my debut. She had more experience. … She was always calming me down and saying, ‘We planned this, so let’s keep [to] this planning.’ It was great to have her, and I think we share the same methods. And we share the same values with the teammates and with the acting cast, so I think that also helped a lot. We prepared the film a lot. We discussed a lot about the film.”
Loayza Grisi said that Utama is not a “message” film about climate change. Instead, it’s a personal drama involving one family and how the generations of that family are impacted by the drought. He believes that a human face on the climate drama is needed in the cinematic realm.
“That is very important for me,” he said. “Since I started working on the writing of the film, it was important because even in Bolivia people don’t know. In the cities, we just don’t know that there is already people from our own country that [are] suffering the consequences of climate change. It’s very different when you put a human face to it. I think that cinema has the ability to speak heart to heart with no translation needed. You can put yourself as a spectator into someone else’s shoes, and you can feel the pain they are feeling. So I think that was very important for the film, and I think in general this is one of the main things that cinema can bring to a society. So, of course, this is a subject that we all should be concerned about, but we are not. So everything that helps with the message is great. I don’t consider the film to be a message film. It’s not. It is a story, but in this story you can have the sense of this problem and the feelings of this problem.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
Utama, written and directed by Alejandro Loayza Grisi, is now playing at New York City’s Film Forum. Click here for more information and tickets.
