Premiering in the Generation Kplus section at this year’s Berlin Film Festival, Through Rocks and Clouds weaves a poignant if predictable tale of tradition and industrialization, set in the rural Peruvian community of Rumicancha.
At the heart of this Peruvian-Chilean coproduction lies Feliciano (Alberth Merma), an innocent 8-year-old alpaca herder whose world revolves around football and his mammalian companions. However, the idyllic existence of the villagers, including Feliciano’s family, is threatened by the relentless encroachment of nearby mining companies. When his cherished alpaca Ronaldo goes missing amidst this simmering conflict, Feliciano embarks on a desperate search.
The themes of director Franco García Becerra’s second feature proves as universal, especially in the Global South, as they are hackneyed. Certain thematic elements, structures, and even specific points recall films such as Pema Tseden’s Snow Leopard, Killers of the Flower Moon, and Lunana: A Yak in the Classroom, just to name a few recent titles. Modernity (in the form of economic progress through uncontrolled mineral extraction) wreaks havoc on traditional ways of life (alpaca herding rural villagers) while the authorities sit idly by. Many herding families have already sold their livestock and left the countryside. Some have joined the machinations of the mining companies against whom the remaining villagers are fighting an uphill battle.
The exposition of this core conflict ambles along with seemingly no interest in specifics or depth. In the midst of the breathtakingly picturesque landscapes of the Andes captured in Johan Carrasco’s cinematography, a few brief shots of yellow haul trucks and their uniformed drivers stand in for the mining companies that we are told are destroying the habitat. The scale of these operations and their impact on the locals’ lives are almost exclusively told, not shown. The stakes finally get high in the film’s final stand-off at the end—“You’re from here, one of us! You have your animals, your fields, your raise alpacas,” one villager shouts at a truck driver—but by then it is too late to scratch beyond the surface of the relationship between these two groups.
While García Becerra’s paint-by-number direction of an undercooked script by Annemarie Gunkel and Alicia Quispe results in a lopsided story, the film’s strength lies in its characterization of Feliciano in the first half. Alberth Merma’s intuitive interactions with Ronaldo and the scene-stealing herding dog Rambo, with whom he shares everything, are unrivalled. An early scene in which the “three amigos” play around in the wild, elevated by Daniel Castro’s gentle guitar melodies, lay a firm foundation for later plot developments when both animals go missing.
Football becomes another theme in the film from the outset. Characters gather around televisions and radios to follow updates on the Peruvian team’s journey to play in the 2018 World Cup in Russia for the first time in 36 years. In an affecting scene that ties together football with the herders’ lives, the director contrasts a flashback of school kids’ bustling football match with the present-day lonely Feliciano standing in an empty field and inside a dusty classroom. The idea of football as a uniting force or a social glue, reinforced by group portrait shots in the credit scene, however, appears more as a last-minute heavy-handed humanistic appeal than a coherent connecting thread in the story. The same goes for the film as a whole. While its story is important and intentions well-meaning, its execution falls short of reaching the same level.
Rating:
Written by Amarsanaa Battulga
View of the Arts is an online publication that chiefly deals with films, music, and art, with an emphasis on the Asian entertainment industry. We are hoping our audience will grow with us as we begin to explore new platforms such as K-pop / K-music, and Asian music in general, and continue to dive into the talented and ever-growing scene of film, music, and arts, worldwide.