BERLINALE 2020 - Anunciaron tormenta (A Storm Was Coming)
70th BERLINALE FILM FESTIVALJavier Fernández Vázquez's Anunciaron Tormenta (A Storm Was Coming) takes the documenting part of its genre far too on the nose in its clustered and unnecessarily-complicated eighty-seven minutes running time.
Even worse, for the most part of the film, it is hard for the viewer to concentrate on what the main theme is; the speed and style employed by director Vázquez is nightmarishly difficult to comprehend. The synopsis reveals that the intended story told here is that of King Ebwera of the Bubi. His account of arrest was first touted in 1904 as a heroic victory, but a closer look at the incident itself and the oral account by the descendants reveal a much darker side of corruption and violation of human rights. Unfortunately, the synopsis is the only part capable of providing some solid information about the content, because the film itself is incapable of doing so.
This is egregious considering that the subject covered has great potential of describing the injustices that took place; the right way of presenting the content could have lead its audience into an introspective journey, to examine the sheer amount of corruption that goes unnoticed on a daily basis. What it ends up being, instead, is baffling and pretentious, to the point the viewer starts wondering if the filmmakers care about the portrayal of the subject.
At a technical level, the film is also frustrating, and incomprehensible. The text and the images are presented with the laziest of edits, which is evident by how the text appearance has no constant speed. More specifically, a succession of every text line is either slower or faster than the one that proceeded it. The images and drawings appear at a sleep-inducing pace, and by the time this phenomenon peaks, the viewer has already stopped giving any sort of care towards the content residing in them. The footage of its narrators reading the documents is the breaking point, though, as these narrators read the documents at such speed, and with such indifference that the enigma surrounding the incident seems forgettable as the incident itself becomes an enigma.
However, the biggest crime is committed when the oral history recited by the descendants in the background is accompanied by lethargic footages of beaches and forests in the foreground. Whatever excitement the narration could possibly hold is destroyed by these utterly boring footages.
Unlike what Vásquez and his team will have the viewer believe, there is no sadness in the passage of time shown through these video clips, images, and drawings. Instead, the randomness of the presentation, coupled with the difficulty to grasp the subject matter, feels like an injustice to the films subject.