INTERVIEW: Kiro Russo continues his mining trilogy with ‘El Gran Movimiento’
Photo: El Gran Movimiento stars Julio Cezar Ticona as Elder. Photo courtesy of Cinema Tropical / Provided with permission.
Director Kiro Russo began his journey into Bolivia’s mining community with 2016’s Dark Skull, which followed the character of Elder (Julio Cezar Ticona) as he navigated personal and professional obstacles. Now, Russo is back with a new film that centers on Elder’s continuing journey. This one is called El Gran Movimiento, or The Great Movement, and it finds the character of Elder heading to La Paz to join a mining protest. But his efforts are minimized by a new illness that causes him to seek the help of a medicine man.
Russo has been working with the local mining community since 2009, and he has no plans to stop. After El Gran Movimiento, which will be released Friday, Aug. 12 at Film at Lincoln Center in New York City, he has plans to finish a new screenplay that will complete Elder’s story.
“Now I’m working on the third part of this trilogy with the miners, which I think is going to be the ending of this job, but I’m not sure,” Russo said in a recent phone interview. “I don’t believe in being the voice for a huge community. I believe more in having real relationships and friendships with people I really love, and that’s what I do mainly.”
Russo first meet Ticona in 2010. He went to a local mining town in Bolivia and started asking questions. He eventually was approached by many miners, and he noticed there was a distance between generations of the men he was interviewing.
“What happens is obviously the miners don’t want for their kids the same destiny basically,” he said. “They are trying to send them away and to connect them more with studies or other things, and this creates a kind of distance between the kids and their parents. … They are guys that basically their fathers died very young, and nowadays they’re not able to go inside the mines to work anymore and to continue the tradition of their fathers. And at the same time there are other ones that are able to go to the mines who are completely disconnected with this reality, and for them it’s a very shocking situation. And on the other hand, there is a lot of alcoholism in all the mining towns in Bolivia and in other countries, too, I think, because obviously the work is very tough, and alcohol is always a way to be a bit more relaxed inside of the mind. But some of the younger generations get very much lost because they don’t have any opportunities, and they get really, really lost. With this path, they can become alcoholics.”
Some of Russo’s friends warned him to be careful when investigating the realities of the mining life in Bolivia. They told him he shouldn’t be in the local towns asking questions and making connections with miners. He decided to forge ahead.
“They always told me about a group of gangs that were around, and it was dangerous,” the filmmaker said. “Because I was crazy, I decided to go to meet these young people, and basically when I met them, for me, it was amazing. I really connected a lot with them.”
It was during the interactions that he met Ticona, and he thought this real miner could become an actor in the trilogy of films he was setting out to make. He appreciated his humor, but also the director thought, with Ticona, he could tap into the rage of being a miner under difficult circumstances.
“My previous film was something very, very important for his life,” Russo said. “Definitely after being a main character in a film he instantaneously got respected by the community and his family again. … Nowadays he’s very, very good. He’s firm. He’s married. He now has a daughter, and for this second film, it was amazing because he definitely became an ‘actor.’ In The Great Movement his role is very physical, and he has to act scenes. … And he’s very connected also with the shooting, with the movement of the camera. I’m really happy with where he is now and what he reached.”
By John Soltes / Publisher / John@HollywoodSoapbox.com
El Gran Movimiento, directed by Kiro Russo, opens Friday, Aug. 12 at Film at Lincoln Center. Click here for more information and tickets.
