Stunning debut, but deadweight for Argentine director

Mumbai, Oct 17 (IANS) His film "Las Acacias" received a standing ovation at the Mumbai Film Fest but Argentinean director Pablo Giorgelli left the audience stunned with his candid admission: "I don't think I'll recover money."

No big deal really, unless you consider that his film which won three prizes at Cannes this year including the Golden Camera, represents one of the most stunning debuts in the last few years.

If this is the fate of such a beautiful, moving and celebrated film, what hope do others have?

"It took me five years to make 'Las Acacias', taking money from wherever I could. It will be nice if I can recover and pay back the money," Giorgelli told IANS later, a shadow of introspection on his jovial face.

And "Las Acacias", Spanish for deadwood, is indeed ironically metaphoric for most film viewers and distributors. This road movie tells a simple story of the relationship between a truck driver who is ferrying a woman with a five-month-old baby across the borders of Paraguay and Argentina, with a huge cache of lumber loaded on the truck.

The lumber behind the truck is a metaphor of the deadwood both the characters are carrying in their subconscious, the ghosts of their sad pasts. It can also be seen as the deadweight of film cliches and expectations that the audiences and distributors worldwide carry that will not allow "one of the most accomplished debuts in history" - as veteran film critic Rashid Irani said of this film - to recover its money.

Yet, in one of the most hopeful films in the circuit this year, there is a metaphor in its hope as well.

The baby who is always happy and cheerful and carries no baggage wins over the reticent truck driver. It is one of the cutest and funniest babies you will see in cinema history of whom Giorgelli told IANS: "It was a miracle that we found the baby, barely a month before shooting began."

The baby is perhaps a simile for a new kind of audience, young folks who are yet untouched by the past of filmmaking or its cliches.

The new generation viewer doesn't need to know that this film took five years of painful birth pangs to be born, or that the casting for the mere three characters that predominate the film took a whopping one and a half years, or the many prizes it has won globally or that the director exorcised his own demons by stripping off layers and layers of unwanted scenes and dialogues to bring before his audience a truly polished gem.

All they need to know and believe in is what they see on screen.

In a quiet, subtle and dignified way, the two protagonists in their hesitant interaction at the climax discard their deadweight. Hope the audiences and film industries globally could do the same for those like Giorgelli.

After all, there cannot be good cinema without good and evolved viewers.

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Las Acacias