Greg "Gringoyo" Berger has the rare talent of making serious political issues seem funny. Imagine if Jon Stewart moved to Mexico, that's Greg. A Jewish New Yorker, political activist, and filmmaker who headed down south in the nineties to cover the Zapatista uprising. He kept going back and forth between the U.S. and Mexico making documentaries and trying to change the world. Eventually, he stayed in Mexico and his films started to transform. It turns out humorous films about serious subjects get people to pay attention. That's what he's been doing ever since.
Frack U. Mexico is his newest short film. It just went up on YouTube and already has more than 50,000 hits. Motivated by recent legal changes in Mexico that allows foreign investment in the oil industry Berger made an instructional video of sorts. Dressed up like a Texas oil tycoon and laying on a heavy gringo accent with a pretty lady wearing a stars and stripes bikini by his side Gringoyo took to the streets of Mexico City to warn everyday citizens about the dangers of fracking (yes, we know exactly what word that sounds like.)
LatinoBuzz caught up with Berger to talk about his newest film, how he wants to avoid the U.S. from fracking the hell out of Mexico, and what it was like to blow up Emiliano Zapata's grave.
Who is Gringoyo?
The clueless gringo who has appeared in all of my political comedies is played by my alter-ego, Gringoyo. Sometimes Gringoyo is a drifting trust fund hippie who follows social movements for the free food. Sometimes he's a greedy businessman, or a clueless gringo foreign correspondent in Mexico. The name Gringoyo is a compound word: "Goyo" is short for Gregorio in Spanish, and gringo, is well, you get it.
Why did you stop making "serious" documentaries and start making funny ones?
Because boring videos can't change the world. Fun videos get you up and out the door, and into the street to start organizing. That's where it's at.
What motivated you to make this specific film? Is there any awareness in Mexico about fracking?
The Mexican government just changed their constitution to allow private and foreign companies to get involved in the oil and gas industry. In September I read an article written by the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza (who has worked extensively with the Texas oil and gas industry) talking about how the coming changes in the constitution would lead to a fracking "revolution" in Mexico. And as I researched further it dawned on me that what was driving changes in Mexican energy policy was a desire from U.S. companies to come in and frack the hell out of Mexico. And no one in Mexico was talking about it. And experience has taught me that the way to start a conversation in Mexico about a serious and difficult issue is to become a jackass gringo pendejo and do silly stuff in the street.
Can you explain your collaboration with Narco News?
Narco News is an online newspaper that has been reporting on the Drug War and social movements in Mexico and Latin America for over ten years, founded by my friend and colleague Al Giordano. I run the video channel of the project, called Narco News TV. Al and another Narco News collaborator, the well known labor and community organizer Oscar Olivera from Bolivia, were the ones who finally convinced me that my comedies were better journalism than my serious documentaries. (Don't ask me what that says about the quality of the serious documentaries I used to make!) One of the most important projects of Narco News is the School of Authentic Journalism, where we teach organizers and journalists how to make effective media about social movements.
How did people react when you were walking around Mexico City dressed as Joe T. Hodo alongside a woman in a stars and stripes bikini?
Well, it's not as strange as you think. Imagine the Star Wars cantina with 25 million people in it. That's Mexico City. That's why I love it, because it's a very welcoming place for genre rara like me. Actually, what's really great is that people could tell what it was about straight off the bat, a gringo playing another gringo, and they willingly entered the fantasy world when they step in front of the camera. And people knew that the woman playing Miss Houston was a smart woman playing an outdated stereotype, and they got into that too, and showed her respect.
How did you get permission to shoot at the Mexican National Congress?
Are you kidding? The United States gas and oil industry owns the Mexican congress! That, and a few other secrets that I can't reveal or you'd have to kill me.
Any funny stories from the shoot?
In the final scene, when we literally set Emiliano Zapata's grave on fire on Dia de Muertos, the local police were there, about three of them, eating potato chips and looking at us with an empty stare. They didn't do anything. Then they started to harass a couple of kids with baggy pants who walked by and we were like, "Oh, glad to know the cops have their priorities straight." We told the cops that the kids were with us and they backed off. I guess dressing like a young person is a crime but setting Zapata's grave on fire is acceptable. Seriously though, we created that scene with some of the descendents of the 1910 Zapatista rebellion, which was an honor, and no Emiliano Zapatas, living or dead, were harmed in the making of the film.
After watching this video, what can people do to help the cause?
Get organized to stop fracking. From New Brunswick, Canada, to Rumania, people are halting powerful interests from the gas industry. It's hard work, but it can be fun too.
You have an interesting distribution model to get your films out there. Can you talk about how you work with the pirate DVD sellers in Mexico?
As long as people use our original title and credit us appropriately, DVD pirates are welcome partners. So we give our DVDs away and they multiply like rabbits through Mexico's pirate DVD network!
The School of Authentic Journalism, a project of Narco News, is currently accepting applications for a four-day intensive workshop on making effective media about social movements.
Written by Vanessa Erazo. LatinoBuzz is a weekly feature on SydneysBuzz that highlights Latino indie talent and upcoming trends in Latino film with the specific objective of presenting a broad range of Latino voices. Follow @LatinoBuzz on Twitter and Facebook.
Frack U. Mexico is his newest short film. It just went up on YouTube and already has more than 50,000 hits. Motivated by recent legal changes in Mexico that allows foreign investment in the oil industry Berger made an instructional video of sorts. Dressed up like a Texas oil tycoon and laying on a heavy gringo accent with a pretty lady wearing a stars and stripes bikini by his side Gringoyo took to the streets of Mexico City to warn everyday citizens about the dangers of fracking (yes, we know exactly what word that sounds like.)
LatinoBuzz caught up with Berger to talk about his newest film, how he wants to avoid the U.S. from fracking the hell out of Mexico, and what it was like to blow up Emiliano Zapata's grave.
Who is Gringoyo?
The clueless gringo who has appeared in all of my political comedies is played by my alter-ego, Gringoyo. Sometimes Gringoyo is a drifting trust fund hippie who follows social movements for the free food. Sometimes he's a greedy businessman, or a clueless gringo foreign correspondent in Mexico. The name Gringoyo is a compound word: "Goyo" is short for Gregorio in Spanish, and gringo, is well, you get it.
Why did you stop making "serious" documentaries and start making funny ones?
Because boring videos can't change the world. Fun videos get you up and out the door, and into the street to start organizing. That's where it's at.
What motivated you to make this specific film? Is there any awareness in Mexico about fracking?
The Mexican government just changed their constitution to allow private and foreign companies to get involved in the oil and gas industry. In September I read an article written by the former U.S. ambassador to Mexico, Tony Garza (who has worked extensively with the Texas oil and gas industry) talking about how the coming changes in the constitution would lead to a fracking "revolution" in Mexico. And as I researched further it dawned on me that what was driving changes in Mexican energy policy was a desire from U.S. companies to come in and frack the hell out of Mexico. And no one in Mexico was talking about it. And experience has taught me that the way to start a conversation in Mexico about a serious and difficult issue is to become a jackass gringo pendejo and do silly stuff in the street.
Can you explain your collaboration with Narco News?
Narco News is an online newspaper that has been reporting on the Drug War and social movements in Mexico and Latin America for over ten years, founded by my friend and colleague Al Giordano. I run the video channel of the project, called Narco News TV. Al and another Narco News collaborator, the well known labor and community organizer Oscar Olivera from Bolivia, were the ones who finally convinced me that my comedies were better journalism than my serious documentaries. (Don't ask me what that says about the quality of the serious documentaries I used to make!) One of the most important projects of Narco News is the School of Authentic Journalism, where we teach organizers and journalists how to make effective media about social movements.
How did people react when you were walking around Mexico City dressed as Joe T. Hodo alongside a woman in a stars and stripes bikini?
Well, it's not as strange as you think. Imagine the Star Wars cantina with 25 million people in it. That's Mexico City. That's why I love it, because it's a very welcoming place for genre rara like me. Actually, what's really great is that people could tell what it was about straight off the bat, a gringo playing another gringo, and they willingly entered the fantasy world when they step in front of the camera. And people knew that the woman playing Miss Houston was a smart woman playing an outdated stereotype, and they got into that too, and showed her respect.
How did you get permission to shoot at the Mexican National Congress?
Are you kidding? The United States gas and oil industry owns the Mexican congress! That, and a few other secrets that I can't reveal or you'd have to kill me.
Any funny stories from the shoot?
In the final scene, when we literally set Emiliano Zapata's grave on fire on Dia de Muertos, the local police were there, about three of them, eating potato chips and looking at us with an empty stare. They didn't do anything. Then they started to harass a couple of kids with baggy pants who walked by and we were like, "Oh, glad to know the cops have their priorities straight." We told the cops that the kids were with us and they backed off. I guess dressing like a young person is a crime but setting Zapata's grave on fire is acceptable. Seriously though, we created that scene with some of the descendents of the 1910 Zapatista rebellion, which was an honor, and no Emiliano Zapatas, living or dead, were harmed in the making of the film.
After watching this video, what can people do to help the cause?
Get organized to stop fracking. From New Brunswick, Canada, to Rumania, people are halting powerful interests from the gas industry. It's hard work, but it can be fun too.
You have an interesting distribution model to get your films out there. Can you talk about how you work with the pirate DVD sellers in Mexico?
As long as people use our original title and credit us appropriately, DVD pirates are welcome partners. So we give our DVDs away and they multiply like rabbits through Mexico's pirate DVD network!
The School of Authentic Journalism, a project of Narco News, is currently accepting applications for a four-day intensive workshop on making effective media about social movements.
Written by Vanessa Erazo. LatinoBuzz is a weekly feature on SydneysBuzz that highlights Latino indie talent and upcoming trends in Latino film with the specific objective of presenting a broad range of Latino voices. Follow @LatinoBuzz on Twitter and Facebook.
- 12/25/2013
- by Vanessa Erazo
- Sydney's Buzz
LatinoBuzz: Alex Rivera & Greg Berger on Making Political Films & Joining a Cheese-Making Collective
Greg “Gringoyo” Berger is an American filmmaker living in Mexico who makes social justice films. He doesn’t take himself too seriously and understands his position as an outsider in the country, often calling himself a revolutionary tourist.
Recently, in light of the drastic and violent effects the drug war has inflicted upon Mexico, he has focused his camera on narcos and failed drug policies. But, unlike his prior more conventional documentaries, his style has evolved to include satire and humor to get his point across.
Berger will be screening several of his short films next week at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens together with Alex Rivera, director of the science fiction film Sleep Dealer. Set in Mexico, it is not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi movie. It’s in Spanish, it’s political and it imagines the near future, a world of cyberbraceros, coyoteks, remotely-controlled drones, aqua-terrorists, and closed borders. Both filmmakers use an imaginative and original lens to look at political issues. And, it turns out they are old college friends.
LatinoBuzz talked to Berger and Rivera about their free screening named “Bordering on Absurd,” what inspired them to make political films, and their college days spent in a cheese-making collective. Yeah, read on. It gets hilarious.
LatinoBuzz: How did the two of you meet? Have you collaborated on films before?
Rivera: We met at Hampshire College in the early nineteen-nineties. Back then, you needed a hand crank to power up the internet, and moving images were recorded in flip books. Even so, we managed to discover a set of shared interests in media, performance, and politics. While we've never produced a film together, we've always been in creative dialogue. Greg is a maniac. In a good way.
Berger: Alex is a maniac too, but he tries to pawn it off on me. During our time at Hampshire College I noticed that Alex had a unique talent for creative community organizing and was a political thinker. We became friends and lived in a kind of co-op housing unit on campus, spending most of our time creating film and performance projects around political issues that we felt passionate about. It seemed like every week we were building a 50 foot version of something for an “urgent” radical media project. For some reason, whatever we were building was always big. And we set up lots of front groups to try and siphon funds from the student activities budget for our projects. We had a cheese-making collective that never made any cheese. We learned to be resourceful. We each had sections of our final-year film projects that needed to be filmed in Florida. Alex needed to interview Jorge Ramos at Univision and I needed to film workers in the Florida citrus industry. We financed our trip by “volunteering” for an interstate car transportation service. We had to smile and convince a Massachusetts State Trooper to let us drive his elderly mom's 1980s Lincoln Town Car to Miami. I remember him looking us over suspiciously as we smiled and explained to him the urgent nature of our film projects. It was sort of like our first pitch to a grant-giving organization. He let us drive the car, which is a better outcome than lots of funding meetings I've had since.
LatinoBuzz: Can you explain the meaning of the title of the screening: “Bordering on Absurd”? And, how did the screening come about? Whose idea was it?
Rivera: I'll let Greg field this one.
Berger: Gonzalo Casals, the Deputy Executive Director at El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan, thought it was kind of absurd that Alex and I have collaborated for so many years but never screened our work together! He has been supportive of both of us for many years. Gonzalo is a big fan of The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, and worked with the team there to make this happen.
Actually, the title “Bordering on Absurd” is a reference to what it sounds like: absurd and surreal politics around the border as a constant theme in Alex's work. And also to my political comedies. The multiple meanings of the U.S.-Mexico border, as a symbol of economic inequality, and as a barrier that unjustly separates families, is a common theme in Alex's work. I use political satire to cover Mexican social movements and the push to end the farcical “War on Drugs.”
A few years ago I decided to give up long-format political documentary filmmaking and focus on political satire. I used to think that if you pointed out how awful something was, people would be moved to change it. I don't think that's true anymore. I've watched the city where I live, Cuernavaca, fall to pieces during the War on Drugs. My friends, family, and neighbors there don't want to hear more stories about how horrible things are. They want hope. Movements to end intolerable situations have to provide hope and even be fun, and so I only use comedy to cover social movements these days.
But what's really absurd is how many “far-fetched” elements of Alex's science fiction work have actually become reality. The remote labor systems, outsourced military contractors, and drone warfare in Sleep Dealer have all turned out to be features of our contemporary historical moment. That's not just bordering on absurd. That's beyond absurd.
LatinoBuzz: Can you talk a little bit about the films you will be showing? What do they have in common? Why did you choose them?
Rivera: Well, as I mentioned, we've always been in creative dialogue, both of us seeking ways to use humor, satire, and genre to directly address contentious political issues. And we've both, for various reasons, ended up in something of a “mental borderland” - working on images and stories and themes that connect the U.S. and Mexico.
Berger: Over the last decade I have been involved with a project in Mexico called The School for Authentic Journalism that is a affiliated with the online newspaper Narco News. I will be screening several short parodies that cover the movements to end the War on Drugs in Mexico, all of which grew out of my work with those projects. Those films include Spring Breakers Without Borders, Narco-Mania, and Foreigner Watch. I will also be screening Now! (¡Ahora!) which I will talk more about in a bit.
LatinoBuzz: When you do a screening like this (which is free) what is your objective?
Rivera: To learn from the audience. To come away a little more fired up to make new work.
Berger: The short term objective is to not get booed offstage. Over the last few years I have been concentrating on internet distribution and distribution via “self-piracy” in Mexico City's bootleg DVD markets. (By that I mean working with networks of bootleg DVD stands to make sure my films are outside every subway station in Mexico City.) Finding mass audiences is important if you want to use film as a political organizing tool, but there's no substitute for screening work in front of a live audience. I steal most of my best ideas from live audiences.
I am also looking forward to speaking with Alex in front of an audience about what we can do to use film as a tool for political movements. I just hope that Gonzalo doesn't have any Jerry Springer type surprises lined up for the event.
LatinoBuzz: Which came first your interest in politics or becoming a filmmaker? Were your films always political or did you evolve as a filmmaker?
Rivera: For a long time I've worked from the belief that Every Film Is Political. It's impossible to make a non-political film. Every time you make a decision about theme, location, cast, etc., you're making a decision that puts certain people and certain points-of-view in the center of the frame. And inevitably, you're also pushing other people and themes to the margins. Always. So the question any thoughtful filmmaker must confront is: who do I want to put in the center? Whose point-of-view do I want to explore?
Berger: I agree with Alex completely. Every film promotes a political worldview. I have been interested in grassroots politics since attending the massive anti-nuclear, anti-Reagan march in New York when I was nine years old. And filmmaking since before I was born. My mother grew up just a few blocks from the Museum of the Moving Image, in a poor, single-parent household, and the movie palace in Astoria was her lifeline to an imaginary world. The local movie theatre in Astoria saved her life, in many ways. She passed her love of film to me.
But for me, learning to become a strategic political filmmaker has been a much more arduous task. Every film is political, but it is much more difficult to produce films alongside social movements that have an impact on the real world, on the work and trajectory of movements.
For me, this became a matter of life or death when the Drug War started to accelerate in Cuernavaca, where I live, about five years ago. Several people I know have been murdered and kidnapped, and at one point I had to pass through two military checkpoints every morning to take my son to school. All because of a ridiculous and failed War on Drugs. That's when I decided that simply “reporting” through film was no longer enough. If I was going to bother to make films, I wanted them to have strategic value and to form part of a broader movement for change. That's what we do at the School for Authentic Journalism, where I co-direct the video program... it's kind of a laboratory for strategic filmmaking.
I put myself in my films, creating characters that satirize misguided U.S. attitudes or policy in Mexico and Latin America. My goal is to use myself as a kind of punching bag to attract attention to movements whose stories need to be told to audiences less interested in “serious” documentaries.
LatinoBuzz: Do you consider yourself an activist who makes films or simply a filmmaker?
Rivera: An aspiring thoughtful filmmaker.
Berger: A comedian and aspiring organizer!
LatinoBuzz: Alex, you are not Mexican. Can you talk about why the U.S.-Mexico border has been such an important part of your work?
Rivera: My father is Peruvian, my mom was born in Brooklyn, of Scottish descent. I grew up in something of a “borderland” with icons of Peru around the house in which I watched “Gilligan's Island.” But that's not the real reason to be interested in the border, and interested in the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. Anyone who's seriously interested in the future of America - and therefore the future of the world - needs to consider the deep, deep connections between the U.S., Mexico, and Latin America. These are histories that are as intertwined as those of Great Britain and India. Or Palestine and Israel. You can't understand one without the other.
LatinoBuzz: Greg, can you explain your nickname Gringoyo and where that came from?
Berger: Well, in Mexico “Goyo” is short for “Gregorio,” and I happen to be one of those gringos who can't hide my gringo-ness no matter what I do, so soon after moving to Mexico in 1998 I said “fuck it” and turned the words Gringo and Goyo into a compound word and my nickname. It also has become a plausible way to separate myself from the dimwitted characters I create in my films. In 2003, I made my first political comedy short, Gringotón, which is about a good-natured but clueless gringo in Mexico City during the Iraq War. Soon after, two people who later became good friends and collaborators, worked hard to convince me to stop making “serious” documentaries and to use these characters like the one in Gringotón to cover the stories of social movements. Those two people were Al Giordano, the founder of the School of Authentic Journalism, and Oscar Olivera, the Bolivian union leader known for his role in the mass movement against water privatization in Cochabamba in the year 2000. Oscar is also a professor of the School of Authentic Journalism. In 2009, as the Drug War heated up in Mexico and comedy seemed a better vocation in the midst of so much pain and suffering, I finally took their advice. So now, I blame all my stupid mistakes on “Gringoyo,” my alter-ego.
LatinoBuzz: Greg, can you talk about how you became interested in Mexico and how you ended up living there?
Berger: It's basically Alex's fault. Alex should actually apologize to the 150 million residents of Mexico for bringing me there and subjecting them to my unpleasant presence.
In 1998, Alex was in the very beginning of his work on what was to become his film Sleep Dealer, and he was learning more about Mexico and brushing up his Spanish, and he invited me to come down to study Spanish with him. I was trying to produce my own films in the U.S. but was barely able to scrape by as a production assistant on horrible commercials and films. So I went to Mexico and loved it. It was the late 90s, and just a few years earlier the Zapatistas in Chiapas had set in motion a series of events that kind of filled social movements throughout Mexico with an infectious feeling of hope, that change from the bottom up was possible. Lots of local struggles felt emboldened by what was going on. So I stayed and began to film these movements, like the famous uprising in the town of Atenco in 2001. These movements became my political teachers and my film school at the same time. Eventually, I met Estela Kempis, a doctor and advocate for reproductive rights, and we started a family together in Morelos.
LatinoBuzz: Greg, your film Now! (¡Ahora!) compares the dreamers to the civil rights movement. What are the similarities of those struggles? Do you think the dreamers should be using similar or different tactics to the civil rights movement?
Let me just start off by saying that the dreamers have become teachers to all of us who strive to become more effective organizers. They are the most inspiring and effective grassroots political movement in North America right now. I love what they are doing. There is nothing about strategy and tactics that I could teach them... quite the opposite, so I won't presume to say what they should or shouldn't do.
And I'd love to explain the context of this film, which is basically a shot by shot recreation of the famous 1965 documentary Now! by Santiago Álvarez.
For those that don't know the story, after the Cuban Revolution, Santiago Álvarez became the unlikely director of newsreel production at the Icaic, the Cuban Film Institute. He was 40 years old and had never made a film in his life. With limited resources and a U.S. blockade to contend with, Álvarez made use of the materials available to him, which often consisted of a few scratched LP records, cutouts from Life magazine, and newsreel footage brought into Cuba by friends and allies. He once said, “give me two photos, a song, and a moviola (film editing device,) and I'll give you a film.” And that's literally what he did!
In 1965, he took images of the U.S. civil rights movement and cut it to a track recorded by pioneering African-American singer Lena Horne called “Now!” The song is something in itself...the melody is actually from the Hebrew song “Hava Nagilah.” Lena Horne had to contend with the apartheid-like conditions of the U.S. entertainment industry and was blacklisted for years, but the content of what she sang was generally never overtly political. But “Now!” was like a bomb. And Santiago Álvarez took that musical bomb and managed to discover the essence of it and turn it into a film montage of the civil rights movement that became an effective and gut-punching document of that struggle. It's an amazing film, and some film scholars call it the first true music video ever made in the sense that it wasn't just a filmed performance but a film that was actually cut to the rhythm of the music to bring out the essence of the song.
Álvarez took the newsreel format and made it both effective political propaganda for the masses and high art at the same time. By some accounts, lots of people would show up to a film in Havana just to see his newsreels, and then leave before the feature.
I teach film at the State University of Morelos in Mexico, and two years ago in a political filmmaking class my students and I began to study the actions of the dreamers in the U.S. Many of my students feel a strong affinity for the dreamers. Almost all of my students, regardless of social class or background, have family in the U.S. and have seen or felt firsthand the suffering that the border and accelerated deportations have created. The parallels between what the dreamers are doing and the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s is clear. It's something that lots of people see. It's obviously different in its objective conditions and long term goals and in lots of other ways, but like the civil rights movement 50 years ago, they are winning and inspiring millions as they forge ahead. They are inspiring my students in Mexico. I assigned to them a project to try and find stills and videos of the immigrants' movements in the U.S. that matched in content and composition the film Now! which we were studying. We managed to recreate about 10% of the film.
Then, a few months ago, as the fame of the dreamers grew and the Senate began to debate immigration reform, I dusted off that old class assignment and finished the film.
As a political film this is really a celebration of the dreamers and of all movements of undocumented people in the U.S., and a reminder that they walk in the footsteps of the U.S. civil rights movement. And notwithstanding setbacks and the continued struggle against white supremacy in the U.S., the civil rights movement of 50 years ago was basically victorious, and so will the immigrants' movements of today.
But also, when I watch this new film we've created, an homage to the dreamers and to Álvarez's masterwork, I think about all the layers of history and the way movements and organizers and media makers can speak to each other across time and space. A Cuban filmmaker in Cuba takes a song written by an African-American and makes it into a film about the U.S. civil rights movement, and then a group of Mexican students work on an updated version of the film 50 years later featuring images of a movement of immigrants with roots from around the world in the U.S. It's very cool to watch.
Join Alex Rivera and Greg Berger for “Bordering on Absurd” a free film screening and conversation at The Museum of the Moving Image on Friday, August 9, 2013. For more information check out the Facebook invite.
Written by Juan Caceres and Vanessa Erazo, LatinoBuzz is a weekly feature on SydneysBuzz that highlights Latino indie talent and upcoming trends in Latino film with the specific objective of presenting a broad range of Latino voices. Follow @LatinoBuzz on Twitter and Facebook.
Recently, in light of the drastic and violent effects the drug war has inflicted upon Mexico, he has focused his camera on narcos and failed drug policies. But, unlike his prior more conventional documentaries, his style has evolved to include satire and humor to get his point across.
Berger will be screening several of his short films next week at the Museum of the Moving Image in Queens together with Alex Rivera, director of the science fiction film Sleep Dealer. Set in Mexico, it is not your run-of-the-mill sci-fi movie. It’s in Spanish, it’s political and it imagines the near future, a world of cyberbraceros, coyoteks, remotely-controlled drones, aqua-terrorists, and closed borders. Both filmmakers use an imaginative and original lens to look at political issues. And, it turns out they are old college friends.
LatinoBuzz talked to Berger and Rivera about their free screening named “Bordering on Absurd,” what inspired them to make political films, and their college days spent in a cheese-making collective. Yeah, read on. It gets hilarious.
LatinoBuzz: How did the two of you meet? Have you collaborated on films before?
Rivera: We met at Hampshire College in the early nineteen-nineties. Back then, you needed a hand crank to power up the internet, and moving images were recorded in flip books. Even so, we managed to discover a set of shared interests in media, performance, and politics. While we've never produced a film together, we've always been in creative dialogue. Greg is a maniac. In a good way.
Berger: Alex is a maniac too, but he tries to pawn it off on me. During our time at Hampshire College I noticed that Alex had a unique talent for creative community organizing and was a political thinker. We became friends and lived in a kind of co-op housing unit on campus, spending most of our time creating film and performance projects around political issues that we felt passionate about. It seemed like every week we were building a 50 foot version of something for an “urgent” radical media project. For some reason, whatever we were building was always big. And we set up lots of front groups to try and siphon funds from the student activities budget for our projects. We had a cheese-making collective that never made any cheese. We learned to be resourceful. We each had sections of our final-year film projects that needed to be filmed in Florida. Alex needed to interview Jorge Ramos at Univision and I needed to film workers in the Florida citrus industry. We financed our trip by “volunteering” for an interstate car transportation service. We had to smile and convince a Massachusetts State Trooper to let us drive his elderly mom's 1980s Lincoln Town Car to Miami. I remember him looking us over suspiciously as we smiled and explained to him the urgent nature of our film projects. It was sort of like our first pitch to a grant-giving organization. He let us drive the car, which is a better outcome than lots of funding meetings I've had since.
LatinoBuzz: Can you explain the meaning of the title of the screening: “Bordering on Absurd”? And, how did the screening come about? Whose idea was it?
Rivera: I'll let Greg field this one.
Berger: Gonzalo Casals, the Deputy Executive Director at El Museo del Barrio in Manhattan, thought it was kind of absurd that Alex and I have collaborated for so many years but never screened our work together! He has been supportive of both of us for many years. Gonzalo is a big fan of The Museum of the Moving Image in Astoria, and worked with the team there to make this happen.
Actually, the title “Bordering on Absurd” is a reference to what it sounds like: absurd and surreal politics around the border as a constant theme in Alex's work. And also to my political comedies. The multiple meanings of the U.S.-Mexico border, as a symbol of economic inequality, and as a barrier that unjustly separates families, is a common theme in Alex's work. I use political satire to cover Mexican social movements and the push to end the farcical “War on Drugs.”
A few years ago I decided to give up long-format political documentary filmmaking and focus on political satire. I used to think that if you pointed out how awful something was, people would be moved to change it. I don't think that's true anymore. I've watched the city where I live, Cuernavaca, fall to pieces during the War on Drugs. My friends, family, and neighbors there don't want to hear more stories about how horrible things are. They want hope. Movements to end intolerable situations have to provide hope and even be fun, and so I only use comedy to cover social movements these days.
But what's really absurd is how many “far-fetched” elements of Alex's science fiction work have actually become reality. The remote labor systems, outsourced military contractors, and drone warfare in Sleep Dealer have all turned out to be features of our contemporary historical moment. That's not just bordering on absurd. That's beyond absurd.
LatinoBuzz: Can you talk a little bit about the films you will be showing? What do they have in common? Why did you choose them?
Rivera: Well, as I mentioned, we've always been in creative dialogue, both of us seeking ways to use humor, satire, and genre to directly address contentious political issues. And we've both, for various reasons, ended up in something of a “mental borderland” - working on images and stories and themes that connect the U.S. and Mexico.
Berger: Over the last decade I have been involved with a project in Mexico called The School for Authentic Journalism that is a affiliated with the online newspaper Narco News. I will be screening several short parodies that cover the movements to end the War on Drugs in Mexico, all of which grew out of my work with those projects. Those films include Spring Breakers Without Borders, Narco-Mania, and Foreigner Watch. I will also be screening Now! (¡Ahora!) which I will talk more about in a bit.
LatinoBuzz: When you do a screening like this (which is free) what is your objective?
Rivera: To learn from the audience. To come away a little more fired up to make new work.
Berger: The short term objective is to not get booed offstage. Over the last few years I have been concentrating on internet distribution and distribution via “self-piracy” in Mexico City's bootleg DVD markets. (By that I mean working with networks of bootleg DVD stands to make sure my films are outside every subway station in Mexico City.) Finding mass audiences is important if you want to use film as a political organizing tool, but there's no substitute for screening work in front of a live audience. I steal most of my best ideas from live audiences.
I am also looking forward to speaking with Alex in front of an audience about what we can do to use film as a tool for political movements. I just hope that Gonzalo doesn't have any Jerry Springer type surprises lined up for the event.
LatinoBuzz: Which came first your interest in politics or becoming a filmmaker? Were your films always political or did you evolve as a filmmaker?
Rivera: For a long time I've worked from the belief that Every Film Is Political. It's impossible to make a non-political film. Every time you make a decision about theme, location, cast, etc., you're making a decision that puts certain people and certain points-of-view in the center of the frame. And inevitably, you're also pushing other people and themes to the margins. Always. So the question any thoughtful filmmaker must confront is: who do I want to put in the center? Whose point-of-view do I want to explore?
Berger: I agree with Alex completely. Every film promotes a political worldview. I have been interested in grassroots politics since attending the massive anti-nuclear, anti-Reagan march in New York when I was nine years old. And filmmaking since before I was born. My mother grew up just a few blocks from the Museum of the Moving Image, in a poor, single-parent household, and the movie palace in Astoria was her lifeline to an imaginary world. The local movie theatre in Astoria saved her life, in many ways. She passed her love of film to me.
But for me, learning to become a strategic political filmmaker has been a much more arduous task. Every film is political, but it is much more difficult to produce films alongside social movements that have an impact on the real world, on the work and trajectory of movements.
For me, this became a matter of life or death when the Drug War started to accelerate in Cuernavaca, where I live, about five years ago. Several people I know have been murdered and kidnapped, and at one point I had to pass through two military checkpoints every morning to take my son to school. All because of a ridiculous and failed War on Drugs. That's when I decided that simply “reporting” through film was no longer enough. If I was going to bother to make films, I wanted them to have strategic value and to form part of a broader movement for change. That's what we do at the School for Authentic Journalism, where I co-direct the video program... it's kind of a laboratory for strategic filmmaking.
I put myself in my films, creating characters that satirize misguided U.S. attitudes or policy in Mexico and Latin America. My goal is to use myself as a kind of punching bag to attract attention to movements whose stories need to be told to audiences less interested in “serious” documentaries.
LatinoBuzz: Do you consider yourself an activist who makes films or simply a filmmaker?
Rivera: An aspiring thoughtful filmmaker.
Berger: A comedian and aspiring organizer!
LatinoBuzz: Alex, you are not Mexican. Can you talk about why the U.S.-Mexico border has been such an important part of your work?
Rivera: My father is Peruvian, my mom was born in Brooklyn, of Scottish descent. I grew up in something of a “borderland” with icons of Peru around the house in which I watched “Gilligan's Island.” But that's not the real reason to be interested in the border, and interested in the relationship between the U.S. and Mexico. Anyone who's seriously interested in the future of America - and therefore the future of the world - needs to consider the deep, deep connections between the U.S., Mexico, and Latin America. These are histories that are as intertwined as those of Great Britain and India. Or Palestine and Israel. You can't understand one without the other.
LatinoBuzz: Greg, can you explain your nickname Gringoyo and where that came from?
Berger: Well, in Mexico “Goyo” is short for “Gregorio,” and I happen to be one of those gringos who can't hide my gringo-ness no matter what I do, so soon after moving to Mexico in 1998 I said “fuck it” and turned the words Gringo and Goyo into a compound word and my nickname. It also has become a plausible way to separate myself from the dimwitted characters I create in my films. In 2003, I made my first political comedy short, Gringotón, which is about a good-natured but clueless gringo in Mexico City during the Iraq War. Soon after, two people who later became good friends and collaborators, worked hard to convince me to stop making “serious” documentaries and to use these characters like the one in Gringotón to cover the stories of social movements. Those two people were Al Giordano, the founder of the School of Authentic Journalism, and Oscar Olivera, the Bolivian union leader known for his role in the mass movement against water privatization in Cochabamba in the year 2000. Oscar is also a professor of the School of Authentic Journalism. In 2009, as the Drug War heated up in Mexico and comedy seemed a better vocation in the midst of so much pain and suffering, I finally took their advice. So now, I blame all my stupid mistakes on “Gringoyo,” my alter-ego.
LatinoBuzz: Greg, can you talk about how you became interested in Mexico and how you ended up living there?
Berger: It's basically Alex's fault. Alex should actually apologize to the 150 million residents of Mexico for bringing me there and subjecting them to my unpleasant presence.
In 1998, Alex was in the very beginning of his work on what was to become his film Sleep Dealer, and he was learning more about Mexico and brushing up his Spanish, and he invited me to come down to study Spanish with him. I was trying to produce my own films in the U.S. but was barely able to scrape by as a production assistant on horrible commercials and films. So I went to Mexico and loved it. It was the late 90s, and just a few years earlier the Zapatistas in Chiapas had set in motion a series of events that kind of filled social movements throughout Mexico with an infectious feeling of hope, that change from the bottom up was possible. Lots of local struggles felt emboldened by what was going on. So I stayed and began to film these movements, like the famous uprising in the town of Atenco in 2001. These movements became my political teachers and my film school at the same time. Eventually, I met Estela Kempis, a doctor and advocate for reproductive rights, and we started a family together in Morelos.
LatinoBuzz: Greg, your film Now! (¡Ahora!) compares the dreamers to the civil rights movement. What are the similarities of those struggles? Do you think the dreamers should be using similar or different tactics to the civil rights movement?
Let me just start off by saying that the dreamers have become teachers to all of us who strive to become more effective organizers. They are the most inspiring and effective grassroots political movement in North America right now. I love what they are doing. There is nothing about strategy and tactics that I could teach them... quite the opposite, so I won't presume to say what they should or shouldn't do.
And I'd love to explain the context of this film, which is basically a shot by shot recreation of the famous 1965 documentary Now! by Santiago Álvarez.
For those that don't know the story, after the Cuban Revolution, Santiago Álvarez became the unlikely director of newsreel production at the Icaic, the Cuban Film Institute. He was 40 years old and had never made a film in his life. With limited resources and a U.S. blockade to contend with, Álvarez made use of the materials available to him, which often consisted of a few scratched LP records, cutouts from Life magazine, and newsreel footage brought into Cuba by friends and allies. He once said, “give me two photos, a song, and a moviola (film editing device,) and I'll give you a film.” And that's literally what he did!
In 1965, he took images of the U.S. civil rights movement and cut it to a track recorded by pioneering African-American singer Lena Horne called “Now!” The song is something in itself...the melody is actually from the Hebrew song “Hava Nagilah.” Lena Horne had to contend with the apartheid-like conditions of the U.S. entertainment industry and was blacklisted for years, but the content of what she sang was generally never overtly political. But “Now!” was like a bomb. And Santiago Álvarez took that musical bomb and managed to discover the essence of it and turn it into a film montage of the civil rights movement that became an effective and gut-punching document of that struggle. It's an amazing film, and some film scholars call it the first true music video ever made in the sense that it wasn't just a filmed performance but a film that was actually cut to the rhythm of the music to bring out the essence of the song.
Álvarez took the newsreel format and made it both effective political propaganda for the masses and high art at the same time. By some accounts, lots of people would show up to a film in Havana just to see his newsreels, and then leave before the feature.
I teach film at the State University of Morelos in Mexico, and two years ago in a political filmmaking class my students and I began to study the actions of the dreamers in the U.S. Many of my students feel a strong affinity for the dreamers. Almost all of my students, regardless of social class or background, have family in the U.S. and have seen or felt firsthand the suffering that the border and accelerated deportations have created. The parallels between what the dreamers are doing and the civil rights movement of the 50s and 60s is clear. It's something that lots of people see. It's obviously different in its objective conditions and long term goals and in lots of other ways, but like the civil rights movement 50 years ago, they are winning and inspiring millions as they forge ahead. They are inspiring my students in Mexico. I assigned to them a project to try and find stills and videos of the immigrants' movements in the U.S. that matched in content and composition the film Now! which we were studying. We managed to recreate about 10% of the film.
Then, a few months ago, as the fame of the dreamers grew and the Senate began to debate immigration reform, I dusted off that old class assignment and finished the film.
As a political film this is really a celebration of the dreamers and of all movements of undocumented people in the U.S., and a reminder that they walk in the footsteps of the U.S. civil rights movement. And notwithstanding setbacks and the continued struggle against white supremacy in the U.S., the civil rights movement of 50 years ago was basically victorious, and so will the immigrants' movements of today.
But also, when I watch this new film we've created, an homage to the dreamers and to Álvarez's masterwork, I think about all the layers of history and the way movements and organizers and media makers can speak to each other across time and space. A Cuban filmmaker in Cuba takes a song written by an African-American and makes it into a film about the U.S. civil rights movement, and then a group of Mexican students work on an updated version of the film 50 years later featuring images of a movement of immigrants with roots from around the world in the U.S. It's very cool to watch.
Join Alex Rivera and Greg Berger for “Bordering on Absurd” a free film screening and conversation at The Museum of the Moving Image on Friday, August 9, 2013. For more information check out the Facebook invite.
Written by Juan Caceres and Vanessa Erazo, LatinoBuzz is a weekly feature on SydneysBuzz that highlights Latino indie talent and upcoming trends in Latino film with the specific objective of presenting a broad range of Latino voices. Follow @LatinoBuzz on Twitter and Facebook.
- 7/31/2013
- by Vanessa Erazo
- Sydney's Buzz
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