Santo Domingo Dispatch.

There seems to be a film festival everywhere now, so why not in the Dominican Republic? They've already got the best parties. It's an easy flight away from New York or Miami, or Havana or Mexico City. I've just returned from the first Dominican Republic Global Film Festival in Santo Domingo, an event founded by the Dominican president Leonel Fernandez, and programmed by Nicole Guillemet, formerly of Sundance and the Miami International Film Festival. With fewer than 20 films, the focus of the program was on politics and current events, with a bit of a Latin American tilt (Babel, Crónicas de Una Fuga, Maquilapolis, El Violin, among others), no surprise given that the festival is the creation of the Global Foundation for Democracy and Development, an organization founded by Fernandez in 2000.

Full disclosure: I wrote an article about the political evolution of American documentaries for the foundation's magazine, hence the invitation.

The festival was not just about the expansion of film culture, although there's as much work to be done on that front in the Dominican Republic as there is in any Latin American country where the weight of Hollywood's boot on the throat of local cinema is, to put it mildly, heavy. The fact that Fernandez is a movie fan can't hurt, but there's a lot of work to do. The Dominicans may eventually want to be part of a campaign for film literacy - a more urgent goal is to bring filmmaking and filmmakers to locations in the Dominican Republic, a sultry, friendly island, with a growing tourist industry that draws mostly Europeans and that now wants to be an alternative to more expensive places to shoot. The Lost City was shot in the DR (Santo Domingo as Havana) by Andy Garcia, who was a guest last week. Miami Vice was another recent production. I'm told that commercials are shot by the dozens in Dominican locations. At panels, of which there seemed to be almost as many as films, Dominicans and experts talked endlessly about "incentivizing" and offering tax breaks. Let's say that the country as a place to shoot or make films is a work in progress. Progress becomes a much more complicated notion when you factor in the eventuality that Cuba, just next door, looks likely to become everyone's favorite location once Fidel Castro is gone. And that could be soon, very soon.

In the festival's recent greatest hits program, which included far too few documentaries (probably following the assumption that regular people wouldn't want to watch them), I caught up with El Violin, Francisco Vargas Quevedo's first feature about the toll that military reprisals in a guerrilla war take on a family in the 1970s. I had been told by people who saw El Violin at Cannes and Toronto that its filmmaking was as strong as its politics.

Shot in black and white, with actors who speak only when they need to, the film has the look of inexpensive American films of the early 1950s that looked at World War II and Korea. Those films were terse and tactile, as were the westerns of the time that built on fatalism and impossible choices. El Violin begins with the torture of a man taken captive by soldiers who then rape women captives. Vargas Quevedo then takes us to the events that got us there. Three generations of a peasant family have witnessed soldiers burn their village to the ground and murder some of the men. Plutarco Hidalgo, an aged farmer, travels to a nearby town with his son and grandson. The son is with the rebels in Guerrero state, and he's making a deal to buy some rifles. Stoic to the extreme, Plutarco plays the violin, even though he has a stump instead of a hand at the end of this right arm, so he straps on the bow with a leather strip. We can only guess how he lost his hand. Plutarco decides to return to his village under the guise of checking the condition of his cornfield, and soon wins over the skeptical captain with his scratchy violin.

We're not talking about a nostalgic Ken Burns soundtrack here, but notes that scratch across a mute landscape from which most of the population has fled. Eventually Plutarco, who's been driven from his land, will have his own confrontation with occupying soldiers. It's not a happy ending, certainly not after his son is captured by the soldiers, but at least Plutarco's grandson knows where his family has stood on questions of right and wrong. The very futility of it all takes you away from the facts of this insurgency during the 1970s. The black and white images could take you back to post-war Italy. So could the long silent sections of the film. The Mexican government can't be happy to see this film. Nor can the tourist board.

It's a shame that El Violin does not have a US distributor yet. As they say, there's cinema, and then there's cinema. I witnessed some of the latter at Casa de Campo, two hours' drive from Santo Domingo, where Sammy Sosa of the Cubs and Orioles celebrated his birthday last Saturday. Sosa grew up dirt poor on the streets of San Pedro de Macoris, but every politician and his mistress (and the US ambassador, Salma Hayek and Julio Iglesias) showed up to toast the baseball star who now seems like royalty. After all, he lives in a palace, with armies of vigilant security guards never too far away. Sosa's place by a swampy lagoon is so enormous that it didn't even feel crowded. Yet the sight of rich men and their well-dressed companions crawling over each other to pay tribute to a baseball player had its surreal side, surreal enough to keep the crocodiles in the lagoon by Sosa's house stay in the water. Hospitable and courteous, Sosa himself welcomed everyone at the door personally, then endured the endless encomiums. Now that's staying power.

The first band to play was Los Ilegales - The Illegals - a great name, given the US paranoia about being overrun by Mexicans in the West, and Dominicans in the East. US diplomats applauding - perhaps even dancing to - The Illegals. It doesn't get much better than that.

Does Sosa have a film in him? Salma Hayek seemed to think so, as she entertained Sammy and the crowd with a less than perfect singing voice, which still must sound better than the voice of Madonna or Julie Delpy might before they put it through the equalizer. Back to baseball. The program included The Republic of Baseball: The Dominican Giants of the American Game, directed by Dan Manatt. More on that in a later dispatch, and more on a former pro American pitcher's efforts to make a feature about Dominican baseball.

Posted by dwhudson at November 13, 2006 2:57 AM