Even the Rain

Gael García Bernal and Luis Tosar play a wide-eyed director and his penny-pinching producer in this drama about a crew arriving in Bolivia to make a film about the arrival of Christopher Columbus in the New World. Frenetic scenes of them casting locals and an arresting shot (straight from Fellini) of a giant cross being flown by helicopter are intercut with grandiose scenes from the film-within-the-film and more newsy episodes concerning the uprising in 2000 against the privatisation of water. The writer is Paul Laverty (Ken Loach’s scribe) and the Spanish director Icíar Bollaín (‘Take My Eyes’) is his wife. Their point is that exploitation, inequality and misplaced ideals cross the centuries, but so too do smart, disenfranchised folk willing to take a stand. Films about filmmaking can be navel-gazing, but Bollaín and Laverty offer a cutting, self-critical analysis of their medium while finding an honest and effective perspective on history – even if Tosar’s late conversion to the way of compassion seems to be missing the point.