ALAMAR (Pedro González-Rubio). 73 minutes. Subtitled. Opens Friday (February 25) at the TIFF Bell Lightbox. See Times. Rating: NNNN
I first saw Pedro González-Rubio’s Alamar in the last days of the 2009 Toronto Film Festival.
Most of the media had gone home, and as a result there weren’t enough people left to create a buzz around the movie’s lovely father-son story, which plays out against the picturesque Mexican coast.
Too small and delicate to attract the notice of a major U.S. imprint, Alamar spent the next year or so wandering the festival circuit while Canadian distributor Mongrel Media tried to figure out what to do with it.
On Friday it finally opens, the latest title in Mongrel’s multi-platform experiment. It’ll be available on Netflix simultaneously with its Lightbox debut, and the DVD comes out Tuesday.
However you see Alamar, please see it. It’s a beautiful, delicate blend of documentary and fiction, the delicately observed story of a Mexican man (Jorge Machado) taking the young son (Natan Machado Palombini) he barely knows on a trip to a coral reef. When they return, the boy’s mother will fly him home to Italy this is likely to be the last time they see each other.
González-Rubio, a documentary filmmaker making his feature debut, serves as the movie’s writer, director, cameraman and editor. He’s made something wonderful, a modest study of human connection in remote surroundings that finds beauty and power in the smallest of gestures – brewing coffee, making fish stew, teaching a child to snorkel.
The actors really are father and son the things we see them do, they’re actually doing. But the fiction of the tale imbues each moment with tenderness and importance. We get the sense that something important is passing from one generation to another, and we’re fortunate enough to witness it.
