Yobs of the jungle
Irene and I went to the Ottawa showing of the Waterwalker film festival last night. Some good, but one utterly excerable film that I feel I must whine about.
The ten year old festival was set up by paddling enthusiasts to honour Bill Mason, filmmaker, painter, paddler and wilderness advocate, whose works Paddle to the sea, Path of the paddle, Song of the paddle, make up a large part of the paddling canon.
Every year, people submit their films about self-propelled activity on water and they’re judged in several categories.
Great idea. But we either need more movies to choose from or better judges because there has to be a way to keep films like Amazon: source to the sea from winning even honourable mention.
I mean, I’ve been in contests where the field was so small that everyone won something, but please judges, next time just don’t award anything.
What was wrong with this movie? It was bad on so many levels. Basically three young white guys from Canada, Australia and South Africa decide to hike and paddle across Latin America, paddling the Amazon from source to sea.
Sounds interesting? Maybe. But the dudes speak almost no Spanish, are macho in the extreme as they stomp through this “undiscovered” territory completely oblivious to the people around them at best, at worst treating them like quaint artifacts or oddities.
Their bright idea for “breaking the ice” with the local people is to give the kids balloons. It reminds me of the ubiquitous image of American soldiers giving gum to the kids of the country they’re invading (Grenada, Panama, Dominican Republic – the list seems endless). They acknowledge that it doesn’t work. That’s about as much awareness as we get.
When they’re storm bound for a couple of days the narrator remarks that the time “gave them the opportunity to explore the culture of the local river people.” But they don’t even bother to get names or names of tribes, or explain anything other than the food they eat.
They show a similar approach when they paddle through territory controlled by Sendero Luminoso. First, they ignore earnest warnings, assuming they’re exaggerated, then when they do get shot at, they’re grateful to be escorted by the army (who first they mistake for more guerrillas). “These were the good guys,” the narrator says, demonstrating a level of analysis that would make the US State Department seem like Chomsky.
Admittedly, Latin American politics are very complex, and Sendero Luminoso are a liberation movement that do a lot of things that people can not support, but our yobs of the jungle make no attempt to understand or find out more about what’s going on.
Two of them duck while one of them paddles fast. I admit, were I in their shoes I would be rowing pretty hard myself.
The film is awfully edited. The voiceover is maudlin, predictable and clumsily melodramatic. It’s all about summiting, peak bagging and conquering. They film some scary moments – good adventure porn, if you like that sort of thing, but the pace is tedium.
Compare this with a similar length film in the festival by Robert Perkins about his trip along the Nimpopo River where as we see him paddling he talks about the tension between conservationism and the livelihood of people who live in areas to be conserved, about his role as a white man travelling through Africa, about the legacy of colonialism.
Our jungle yobs just go on and on about being battered against rocks, parched by the desert and whether or not the stove they brought (without realizing that they couldn’t get the right gas for it) is going to explode.
The film ends appropriately enough with a scene at the mouth of Amazon, with the three yobs planting their flags in the sand by the sea, much like Cortes and de Champlain did, claiming the territory as if they owned it.
The festival line up lists a number of other films which makes me wonder why we get stuck with this runner up. Ah well. I’m glad they survived. But I wish their video camera had got washed overboard.
