[
EL VELADOR screens Wednesday September 12th at 7 pm at the Cleveland Museum of Art.]
Review by Charles Cassady, Jr.
If one didn’t have liner notes to what
EL VELADOR was all
about, the nonfiction feature would be pretty much mystifying. In confronting
the potentially searing topic of drug violence and fatalities in modern-day
Mexico, filmmaker Natalia Almada tries a minimalist approach to a maximalist
problem, presenting, with no preamble, no interviews, no explanatory narration,
the day-to-day routine of a town cemetery kept "busy" by the carnage,
even though most of what we see is quiet and deceptively siesta-peaceful.
Gravediggers and groundskeepers, mostly silent, do their
work with portable radios on. The night watchman arrives. Attractive young
women in black sweep dust off mausoleums and memorials – and only with the
press release material accompanying can one figure out that these shapely
senoritas are, in fact, the bereaved widows, whose children play among the
headstones.
