Revolutionary Zapata reinvented

By Diego Cevallos

Mexico City, Mexico, May 8 (IPS) — The film “Zapata, el sueño del héroe” (Zapata: The Hero’s Dream) premiered in Mexico in the wake of a major advertising campaign and under harsh criticism for pulling the revolutionary hero out of historic context and putting him in a landscape of fantasy.

“I violated official history, but I don’t care because I produced a very beautiful baby,” said director Alfonso Arau in justifying the abyss between his film and the real history of Emiliano Zapata.

Controversy trailed Arau’s project ever since he first laid it out seven years ago, because it centers on a key figure in Mexican culture, an icon of the struggle of a range of different political movements, including the leftist insurgent Zapatista National Liberation Army (EZLN).

Zapata played a leading role in the “agrarian” revolution of the early 20th century. His cry of “land and liberty” remains one of the loudest slogans of the marches and protests that take place in Mexico.

The distribution of land amongst peasant farmers and agrarian reform were the banners Zapata fought for. His thick moustach and deep gaze established themselves as major Mexican emblems.

But “Zapata, el sueño del héroe” presents a stereotype more than a real person, closer to shamanism and zeroed in on marital problems more than armed struggle and history, film critic Marcelo Estrada said.

“It is a film made to Hollywood specifications, where they value indigenous culture dressed up as exotic, with attractive characters immersed in a fantasy story,” Estrada said.

Since March, Mexicans have been bombarded by intense advertising for the film, including brief previews broadcast repeatedly by TV channels and shown before features in the cinemas. Enormous posters of Zapata were unfurled over buildings and walls throughout the capital.

For the premiere, 430 copies of “Zapata” were distributed, setting a record for Mexican films.

“The audience has the last word,” said Arau. “I am not asking them to be benevolent; I just hope they have a positive and supportive attitude.”

And the film’s producers hope to recuperate the eight million dollars invested in the project.

Arau has spent part of his directing career in Hollywood, where he won fame for his film Like Water for Chocolate (1991), but the Zapata project was shot entirely in Mexico and with local actors, like Alejandro Fernández, who plays the hero, and female singer Lucero.

“It is laudable that the work was done in Mexico, but it would be absurd to go and close one’s eyes, and not say that the film is hardly believable and not very deep,” said critic Estrada.

Arau, known for greater focus on exquisite images than on delving into content, explained that his film “is not a documentary or a soap opera. It is a classical tragedy, a mystic fable in which everything is symbolic.”

The film is “esoteric and spiritual” and is from the perspective of a mythical hero, “like the life of Christ, Buddha, or Mohammed,” he said.

In the film, Zapata appears as a figure close to the indigenous gods, as an honest and incorruptible man who suffers inside for loving two women.

The historic context in which the plot unfolds is diffuse. It presents characters who did indeed exist, but in situations and times that are not in keeping with history.

Arau says that some years ago he had a dream in which Zapata appeared and asked him to tell the revolutionary’s “true story, and not the false ‘cardboard’ story that has become dogma in history books.”

The film was shot in the state of Morelos, neighbouring the capital, and where Zapata was born, lived, fought — and died in 1919.

The director says that a large portion of the film — he also wrote the screenplay — is based on stories he heard from peasant farmers in Morelos, for whom Zapata is a sort of shaman.

But Mexican historians say the film has little or nothing to do with the events that occurred in the early 20th century, and should be taken with a grain of salt.

Zapata, assassinated after leading thousands of peasant farmers in the revolutionary struggle that culminated in 1917 and claimed a million lives, is seen as an example to follow by most of Mexico’s political parties, by peasant groups and guerrilla organisations.

“General Zapata is alive and guides our struggle,” is one of the slogans of the EZLN, which took up arms in 1994 in the southern Mexican state of Chiapas.

In what appears to be a response to Arau’s film, the Mexican studio Argos was hired by the US-based Telemundo, a Spanish-language TV network, to produce a miniseries on Zapata’s life. Its creators assure that it will stick to historic fact.

On another front, Canal 11, one of the few cultural television companies in Mexico, is preparing a documentary on Zapata that does take up the origins of the myth that surrounds him.

Scientist transformed radio into weapon against abuses

By Ella Turenne

New York, New York, May 8 (IPS) — “I have no weapon other than my journalist’s profession, my microphone, and my unshakable faith as a militant for change,” said famed Haitian radio personality and human rights advocate Jean Dominique, who was assassinated four years ago.

That faith in change would cost Dominique his life, but not his legacy, asserts ‘The Agronomist’, a documentary about the scientist- turned-journalist, which opened to packed houses in New York theatres in April.

In a series of intimate interviews with Dominique before his death and with the activist’s wife, Michelle Montas, director Jonathan Demme — famous for The Silence of the Lambs — paints a picture of a man driven by his need to give the Haitian people a voice — and the opportunity to decide their own affairs.

Born in 1931 to a well-to-do family in Haiti’s capital, Port-au-Prince, Dominique grew up with a father who instilled in him extreme pride and nationalism. He studied agronomy, the scientific study of agriculture, in France and practiced his trade for six years after returning to his homeland.

As time went on, Dominique began to question some practices of the governing Duvalier regime as he worked to improve the condition of the land. As a result, he was jailed for six months.

After his stretch in prison, Dominique went looking for other opportunities. In 1968, while working in radio, the chance came for him to purchase the country’s oldest station, Radio Haiti Inter, and he seized it.

Dominique had a vision. He planned to change the face of Haitian radio, which at that time, still under the Duvalier regime, was used solely for entertainment. Dominique wanted to introduce Creole to the French-speaking medium and, most importantly, to provide information about his native land. This he described as “risky business.”

Risky it was. Over the course of Dominique’s time at Radio Haiti Inter, the station was shot at on numerous occasions, lives were threatened, staff arrested, and Dominique and his wife forced into exile on two occasions. What was extraordinary about the personality, the man, the human being behind the fight, was the unshakeable, almost fearless, nature of his belief in the Haitian people.

Dominique told his listeners about struggles for human rights in other countries, knowing that Haitians would make the connection between their own plights and those of others around the world. And when Haitians did take up their own struggle, Dominique was there, broadcasting it all live and direct.

He survived the regime of Francois “Papa Doc” Duvalier (1956-71) and that of the ruler’s son, Jean-Claude “Baby Doc” Duvalier (1971-86). After the latter was overthrown, Dominique returned to Haiti from his exile in New York and rebuilt Radio Haiti Inter. Those were optimistic times: when it seemed the rise of Jean-Bertrand Aristide would finally return some semblance of democracy to Haiti.

But those times did not last. Dominique began to smell danger in the air before he was killed in April 2000. His murderers have yet to be brought to justice.

What would drive a man such as Jonathan Demme to make such a film? As a director of big-budget Hollywood movies like Silence of the Lambs and Philadelphia he could easily spend his time on mainstream topics. But Demme says his relationship with Haiti is personal.

“I’m a filmmaker who loves Haiti,” says the director. “The press has been so negative. I need to be making films that show the positive side.”

Demme met Dominique in 1987 while working on Haiti: Dreams of Democracy, a 1988 documentary on celebrations as the country marked a year of freedom from the Duvaliers. He became interested in telling the story of the man who had started his career as an agronomist and became a human rights activist via radio.

Demme told the audience at the premiere he hopes the new film will educate people not only about Dominique, but about Haiti and Haitians’ struggle as well.

Audience members at the premiere asked what they could do to improve the situation in Haiti, where a US-led multinational force has patrolled since Aristide was ousted Feb. 29. Demme said they could express outrage to their elected officials about Washington’s manipulation of the Caribbean nation.

Jocelyn McCalla, executive director of the National Coalition for Haitian Rights (NCHR) was also at the event, a benefit for NCHR and Radio Haiti Inter.

“It is time for Haiti to live in democracy not dream about it,” he said. “I hope that people will continue to tune into this issue.”

McCalla feels that when people see the film, “they cannot remain unmoved,” and hopes the movie will be a catalyst to rebuild Radio Haiti Inter, a still much-needed vehicle for communication in Haiti.

Haitian-born hip-hop artist Wyclef Jean was also moved by Dominique’s story and wrote the score for the film. “We have to bring some sort of awareness, start some form of revolution,” he told the audience.

Dominique’s wife, Michelle Montas, was also a personality at Radio Haiti Inter. After an attempt on her life in 2002, she fled to New York and now works at the United Nations.

Equally as militant, equally as fearless as her husband, her support of the Haitian people while at Radio Haiti Inter and her courage and defiance after Dominique’s death are a testament to her work.

“His assassination became the emblematic case,” Montas said. Recognising that Dominique’s death was not an isolated incident, she has pursued justice in this case, however bleak her chances. Although no one has been charged for his murder, Montas hopes her campaign will set an example and show that acts of violence in Haiti cannot go unnoticed and without consequences.

“The film has reached out for people who don’t know, for whom this is all a new story,” Montas said. “It’s a homage to friend, the story of Haiti, the story of a land, the story of the links of a man and the land.”