In most of Latin America, beneath the bottom in the social scale there still live people. And a lot of those people are children. Kids without parents. With no school. Bereft of the joys of childhood. Deprived of any future. Children for whom abuse, rape and even violent death are everyday occurrences.
This view from underneath the bottom' is a recurrent theme in recent Latin American cinema or in movies based on Latin American novels.
A few examples: `Capitaes da Areia' (Engl. title The sandpit generals'), directed by Hall Bartlett in 1972, written by Brazilian Jorge Amado, was based on true stories about streetwise rascals in Salvador de Bahía. Another Brazilian film, `Pixote: A Lei do Mais Fraco' (Hector Babenco, 1981) revived the same theme using real abandoned kids as players, and when Fernando Ramos Da Silva, the leading actor, was actually killed in those same streets, Paulo Halm and Jose Joffily continued the saga with the sequel `Quem matou Pixote?' (Who killed Pixote?', 1996).
In Argentina, the recent `Pizza, birra y faso' (Adrián Caetano & Bruno Stagnaro, 1997) reformulated the subject for present day Buenos Aires, and there are two great and dreadful Colombian films (both by Víctor Gaviria): `Rodrigo D.' (Engl. title Rodrigo D: no future', 1990) and `La vendedora de rosas' (1998), which painted the same motif in still darker colors.
Now a new member has added to this family of true-to-life films, about the menacing insurgence of the desperado human products that arouse from the explosive mixture of extreme poverty, social segregation and a complete lack of hope.
The 1999 Ecuadorian film `Ratas, ratones, rateros' (Engl. title Rodents') has just won the Trieste Latin Film Festival (both the Grand Prix and the Opera Prima awards), after being acclaimed at the Mostra' in Venice and at the Toronto Film Festival. Its author (writer/director) is Sebastián Cordero, born in Ecuador (1972) and a graduate of USC. The film was completed on a very low budget (just below the 200,000 dollars line). 35 mm. 109 min.
Rodents' shares with its predecessors a common and implicit wrath against social injustice, a widespread compassion for its victims, a taste for street language and vulgarisms, a tragical and hopeless film ending and a certain apocalyptic comprehension of the future.
No one can blame Cordero because of this point of view. It's quite understandable. Ecuador, a small South American country, is immersed in a deep economical crisis, has changed four governments in the last five years and is currently ranking among the most corrupt countries in the world. Therefore, there is little room for hope.
Yet Cordero stands on that last piece of hope. While Gaviria's appalling films should be considered almost docudramas, because of their extensive use of wild and improvised footage and sound, Rodents' is entirely fiction. This fact allows Cordero to develop the film's subject without any trace of pamphleteer's or social reformer's speech, while giving his theme a treatment entirely free of any effete or wimpy false sympathy for the street hardened characters he depicts.
Based on reality, but reconstructed and rearranged in the mind of an artist, the film becomes a forceful condemnation of the situation it enlightens and must be considered a powerful weapon in the struggle for a better future in his country.
A standing ovation for Sebastián Cordero, a young master.
