Searching for Authenticity in the Film ‘La Marea’

Jimmy Centeno, a founding member of Philosophies of Liberation Encuentros, has been an independent art curator, writer, welder, and artist. We excerpt here from his CounterPunch review of the film La Marea/Corriente.

La Marea/Corriente (Wave/Current 2020) is filmmaker Miguel Novelo’s counter narrative to the American dream… The film carries a youthful layer of optimism with a subtle dialectic framework between the Mexican filmmaker who immigrated to the United States and his co-national who decides to pursue the Mexican dream. The main protagonist, Jorge, affirms his place of dwelling in the world distant from the major metropolises of México and the global North…

The documentary has the quality reminiscent of the advice that renowned Revolutionary Cuban filmmaker Humberto Solas, founder of the first Cine Pobre Film Festival in 2003, shares with filmmakers. He says, “film life, go film the children, the beach, the sea…”

La Marea falls under the same spell/spirit expressed by Solas. Its visual presentation takes the viewer through the unspoiled happiness from/through the shadow of an encroaching (terrorizing) adverse effect of the fanatic politics of neoliberalism on all life…

Jorge’s wish is to become an animal caretaker rather than continue the family tradition of fishermen and divers. His friends ask Jorge why he is not following in the footsteps of his father and grandfather. Jorge, a musician who plays the guitar, seems to have chosen to spend his youth in activities that do not carry the weight of a corporatist’s spirit by extending/nurturing his caring sensibility to creatures dear to him and not be at the mercy of the market as an objectified/alienated laborer. One step towards the north away from his nonurban town with ways of being not quite diluted is one step less for Jorge’s preservation of his particular being. As minute as it might be, it is one less human empowering the control and domination of the U.S dollar over all aspects of Mexico’s economy, as well as its cultural and political identity…

La Marea’s narrative is a utopia that belongs to all those who retain a spirit of youth and the will of life aimed at change and becoming today what we all want to collectively be tomorrow regardless of age. It is an attempt to rescue the liberating content in utopia. For utopia is more than a slogan of yes we can. It is mythic energy encapsulated within horizons of hope in human memory… Utopian theory must depart from the political lived reality. The closer theory is to the current political reality, the better equipped we are to understand our role in the world in community that is: el ser humano es el ser supremo para el ser humano in coexistence with nature. For there is no moment in human history without the company of utopias.