Award-winning Peruvian multi-hyphenate Joanna Lombardi (“In House,” “How To Get Over a Breakup”), formerly in charge of heading Movistar’s original content slate for Latin America, dives into documentary with her latest feature “Stay Still” (“Quédate Quieto”), selected to screen in competition at the upcoming Málaga Festival, running Mar. 1-10.
Produced by Lombardi alongside Hernán Musaluppi co-headed Cimarrón Cine (“El Motoarrebatador”) and Enid “Pinky” Campos (“Dioses”), the film – selected for San Sebastian’s Co-Production Forum in 2021 – centers on a gravedigger and two young women vying for security and a place to settle down.
“At first, I approached this story because I wanted to relay what it was like moment by moment to invade a piece of land. Find the place, demarcate the space and have to stay there, without moving, so that they don’t take it away from you. In order to tell this story, I spent time walking through encampments, looking for a woman who’d lived the experience and wanted to talk about it,” Lombardi toldPvNew.
“On one of those journeys, I found an illegal cemetery in the middle of a hill. It seemed incredible to me that it was there. I kept walking until I met Hilton, the illegal gravedigger of this cemetery. I spent about two years interviewing Hilton while he looked for a woman who didn’t appear. In these conversations with Hilton, I discovered that his greatest fear was that a new encampment would come to the cemetery, that his space would be taken away from him, and that he would no longer be able to bury. The invader was afraid of being invaded,” she continued.
Hilton’s an unlikely protagonist. In the middle of the clandestine cemetery he’s cobbled together –a vast expanse of makeshift graves that litter the dusty patch of land he inhabits –he’s introduced as he sits with a furrowed brow after digging out a fresh plot.
Flanked by surrounding houses that line crowded hillside communities, his livelihood is increasingly threatened when young Cristina and Hilda weave through the foggy property – a meager bag of belongings in tow- to stake their claim on a patch of land that’s been cordoned off and turned into a squatter’s encampment.
All encroaching but on disparate courses, the three further struggle when their rights are called into question by outside forces.
The documentary portrays a grand dichotomy throughout, Hilton steadily scheming to stay put while the girls lightly regale one another with talk of relationships, family ties, the neighbor boys and just who’ll be tasked with fetching the day’s snacks. They stave off boredom while earning their chance at security, the same security that Hilton could lose overnight.
“When Hilda and Cristina appeared, the film finished taking shape. They represented a new generation that came to claim their space, what belonged to them. Not from a place of poverty, but from the place of joy and strength that comes from wanting to become independent, to be an adult, to have a home,” Lombardi relayed.
Cinematic in execution, “Stay Still” manages a divinely poetic realism. No heavy-handed narration, no one-on-one interviews, simply three humans living out their plights aside the dearly departed and wholly alive amidst a rural backdrop.
“When I decided to make this film, in 2017 – it has been a very long and difficult process – I was very clear that it had to be a documentary, that I needed them to be natural actors who’d relate what had happened to them themselves. The film was going to be built through their real experiences and I had to have a more observant role,” Lombardi explained.
“I’d never made a documentary. What happened to me is that, all the time, my pulse was towards fiction, towards setting up scenes, towards having a dramatic structure. I worked a lot with Hilton, Hilda and Cristina, we became good friends and I managed to get them to tell me things without fear. Little by little I made the improvisation dynamics feel more natural. In the end, we end up telling a story that seems like fiction but it’s constructed entirely by them,” she added.
Lombardi never forces her protagonists out of their comfort zones, allowing them to be likable or unlikeable at their leisure. This prompts a tangible reliability in the authenticity of the story they unravel. No masks left on, Hilton’s never forced into a grin and the young women, never nudged to diminish their vibrant and hopeful glimpses ahead.
Low-key and ethereal, sweeping visuals merge with riveting subject matter as the film drills down on tempered faith and stifled worry. A macabre yet fresh, relevant and poignant look at human relations amidst the tension that builds when one man seeks to maintain a lifestyle he pilfered to secure, while throwing proverbial boulders down at those climbing uphill seeking the same fortune.
“The conflict over land is one of the basic conflicts of humanity that does nothing but generate violence throughout the world. It’s created a huge conflict, forever,” Lombardi opined. “I see this film as a fable, as a story that allows you to enter a universe unknown to many but that talks about the same thing. It’s a film that doesn’t try to explain the phenomenon of invasions, but instead tries to get closer to characters who are neither good nor bad, who defend what they feel is theirs. Who has the right to that land? The living or the dead?”
