For me, a highlight of the 2019 MQFF was the 2018 Guatemalan feature Jose, written co-produced and directed by Li Cheng. I don't remember ever seeing a Guatemalan film before.
Li Cheng and his collaborator, George F Roberson interviewed working-class LGBTIQ men of colour in 12 Latin American countries including 20 cities. The lived for two years in Guatemala and drew on the interviews to write the fictional character and story of Jose.
Jose (Enrique Salanic) is a Maya 19 year old who lives with his anxiously protective single mother (Ana Cecilia Mota) in a far-flung, working-class district of Guatemala City. With his help, she scratches out a precarious living as an unlicensed seller of sandwiches in markets and at bus-stops as bureaucrats make it more and more difficult. Jose battles his way for hours on buses and on foot to get to very low-paid work as a shukero in the inner city. He competes with shukeros from other restaurants, dodging heavy traffic in a six-road intersection, flagging down drivers to entice them into the restaurant or to order shukos, (sausage sandwiches) and drinks that he delivers to them on the road.
In the afternoons, he cruises men on street corners and uses his mobile phone to arrange casual sexual encounters in dreary, bottom-of-the-range flophouses.
Jose is his mother's youngest, her favourite. She is very dependent on him. She takes him to evangelical Protestant church services (with horribly out-of-tune music) and uses emotional, religious blackmail to try to protect him from threats such as gangs and drugs and keep him with her. He has no privacy at home as the bedrooms are doorless.
One of Jose's clandestine hookups is with Luis (Manolo Herrera), a mestizo construction worker about the same age from Izabal near the tropical Caribbean coast. Unexpectedly, they take time to talk and develop intimacy and so fall very much in love. They steal more and more time together in the city and in the countryside.
The film is very open in its depiction of nudity and sex scenes. The love scenes with Jose and Luis are passionate and endearingly tender.
The film makers were told they would never be able to get Guatemalan men to kiss in the film, but their social media casting calls drew over 600 non-professional hopefuls. Enrique Salanic told them of an ancient image of two Mayan kings kissing.
The couple come under increasing pressure from their families and others. When Luis asks Jose to leave the city with him, saying he will build them a little house in the country and save up to extend it in time, Jose is torn between his strong desire to go with him and his loyalty to his mother.
Guatemalan interviewees told the film makers that extremely homophobic attitudes and religious extremism make it impossible for gay couples to live together. They also told him of their experiences of extreme threats and violent attacks by their mothers when they found out their sons were gay. But they believe that their mothers will look after them in the end. Jose's mother is not violent and they don't talk explicitly about his sexuality, but Luis shows him the scars resulting from his brothers' violent homophobic attacks.
Without being the least bit preachy and with nothing wordy at all, the film, which avoids sensational filming of the commonplace most extreme occurrences in Guatemala, shows the third world conditions most people have to live with, including worsening poverty, lack of access to education for the poor, drug gang violence and other crimes, child murders, extreme Catholic and Protestant religiosity, machismo, sexism, homophobia. 67% of births are to single mothers. The country is at or near the bottom of every indicator.
Li Cheng is strongly influenced by the films of Hou Hsiao-Hsien and Pier Paolo Pasolini and the Italian post-war Neo-Realists. Cinematographer Paolo Giron's camera follows Jose through his days and nights in the streets and neighbourhood. Many scenes are wide shots filmed by an unmoving camera at a respectful distance in a documentary style. Interior night scenes seem as if they were filmed in ambient light.
As is his regular custom, Jose travels to a rural Pacific coastal area where he stays with his grandmother (Alba Irene Lemus), helps out with seasonal work and asks her about her life. She has lived alone since her husband disappeared during or at the end of the 35-year civil war in 1996. The war normalised still-ongoing murderous violence.
In the final scenes, we see Jose in the lush tropical Izabal area where he contemplates Mayan stone sculpture and makes his way a vast green plaza toward ancient structures.
The ending of the film is very quiet and low-key. Li Cheng intended it to suggest hope.
About half of the population is now under 19 which Li Cheng thinks is hopeful for the future.
Li Cheng grew up in China and moved to the USA where he obtained a PhD in biotechnology at Rutgers University and worked as a medical researcher before becoming a film-maker.
Jose . with its all-Guatemalan cast and crew challenges Latin American queer cinema which Li Cheng and George Roberson characterise as focusing only on middle-class and upper-class white people to the exclusion of working-class, urbanised, darker-skinned men.
Jose premiered at the Venice Film Festival where it won the Queer Lion in competition with films including The Favourite (which won the Golden Lion) and Luca Guadagnino's Suspiria.
I'm hoping I can find a way to see this film again.
