Headlines, Latin America & the Caribbean

/ARTS WEEKLY/ FILM-MEXICO: Revolutionary Zapata Reinvented

Diego Cevallos

MEXICO CITY, May 4 2004 (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 centres 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 moustaches 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 told IPS.

"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 they 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 and 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, and by peasant groups and guerrillas 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 U.S.-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.