Colombia Director Pursues Politics Verite

SANTA CECILIA, Colombia —  Sergio Cabrera had a hard time adjusting when his family came home to Medellin after eight years in China. A teenager who had been a member of the militant Red Guard just did not fit into the city’s conservative culture of the late 1960s.

So he joined the country’s Maoist guerrillas.

Four years later, Cabrera came down from the mountains to become Colombia’s most successful director. His credits over the last two decades include critically acclaimed hit movies and half a dozen popular television series.

When Cabrera, now 47, tried to explain that evolution recently to his teenage daughters, they were confused. How could their soft-spoken father have been one of the subversives criticized on the news for kidnapping, trafficking cocaine and blowing up oil pipelines?

“The explanation took eight days,” Cabrera recalled, shaking his gray curls. “After eight days . . . they asked me, ‘So, now aren’t you going to do anything for this country that you love so much?’ ”

That conversation led to the launch of a new career: Cabrera is running as an independent candidate for Congress in Sunday’s elections on a platform for a peaceful end to Colombia’s decades-long civil war.

At the same time, he is directing his sixth feature-length film with a cast and crew that would make the Redgraves and the Hustons envious.

‘Small Reflections on the Great Problems’

Three generations of Cabreras--including his wife and ex-wife--are working together here in Colombia’s eastern plains to produce a dark comedy about a truce between a small group of soldiers and guerrillas.

The cinematic cease-fire is caused by an event that unites all Colombia every four years: the national team’s match to qualify for soccer’s World Cup. Battles between soldiers and insurgents have left only one working television in an oil town, and both sides want to see the game.

“I try to make small reflections on the great problems of the country,” Cabrera said between takes of “Golpe de Estadio,” a play on words between coup d’etat--golpe de estado--and the Spanish word for stadium. “The first step toward peace is to dignify the enemy, and the movie is about that. . . . When there is a common objective, peace is possible.”

Cabrera tries to portray the guerrillas as he knows them, neither heroes nor the bandits that military leaders often call them.

He keeps up communication with his old comrades, mainly through leaders who have been caught and imprisoned, and can thus be easily found.

He consulted with them about his new movie and his run for Congress, to be sure they did not object. Failing to do so could be fatal.

Cabrera respects the guerrillas even though he became disillusioned with them.

From Insurgency to Democracy

His disenchantment stemmed from an assignment in the early 1970s to persuade a group of Embara Indians to join the insurgency. He was to manipulate them into sabotaging a dam project that was going to flood their lands.

As he talked to them over two years, he became convinced that the Indians were better off accepting a relocation offer. He discreetly told the leaders his conclusion and left. Shortly afterward, he quit the guerrillas.

“I saw that was not the solution,” he said. “The guerrilla is like the white corpuscles of a country that has an infection. The guerrilla is a symptom of injustice.”

Cabrera has decided to fight injustice his own way. He complemented the skills he had developed as a child actor with cinematography courses at the London Polytechnic of Dramatic Arts and set out to make movies.

“I am a shy person and I don’t talk much, but the cinema lets me whisper in people’s ears about small, insignificant things that, taken together, form a way of seeing the world that is healthier than what we were taught,” Cabrera said.

Increasingly, his films whisper about the advantages of making decisions democratically.

“I did not believe in democracy,” Cabrera said. “I believed in socialism. So all these years of reflection have led me to an authentic, sincere conviction, like someone who finds God late in life. I firmly believe in democracy.”

Two years ago, he joined the civic organization Colombia Siempre (Colombia Forever) and began working on a committee that was studying peace.

Various Colombia Siempre committees decided that peace and solutions to their country’s other problems are only possible if the power of the political machines is broken. To do that, Colombia Siempre decided to run its own candidates for Congress and asked Cabrera to head their 10-candidate legislative ticket.

“He has a solid political formation,” said Juan Lozano, a founder of Colombia Siempre. “He thought it over carefully and accepted on the condition that a group of people would advise him.”

Another condition was that, because he was filming “Estadio,” he would campaign only on weekends.

For the past month, Cabrera has directed Monday through Friday and spent Saturday and Sunday walking through neighborhoods to ask for votes and meet with other groups, including former guerrillas, to figure out a strategy for peace.

Like his movies, Cabrera’s congressional campaign is low budget. He has no banners, no free T-shirts.

“The bottom line is that I am lending my name to carve a trail in the struggle for [control of] Congress, because the other candidates on my ticket are not popular enough to get elected,” he said.

Extended Family on the Movie Set

He also is trying to set an example of tolerance on the set of “Estadio,” with its extended-family cast and crew.

“Generally, it is difficult for a wife and ex-wife to have a good relationship,” he said. “We have to learn to be flexible. . . . I’m trying to apply in my own case what I think should happen in the country.”

Florina Lemaitre, an actress who was divorced from Cabrera two years ago after 16 years of a very public marriage, said she was flattered when he called her to work on the film.

“It’s hard on the people around us, sometimes, but not on me,” she said, combing her light brown hair in the dressing room that doubles as the movie village’s police station. “Sergio has matured as a director, and I want to enjoy him now, after I suffered” through his early attempts.

His father also is playing a key role, and his eldest daughter is behind the camera.

The one Cabrera not on the set is the director’s mother, who was a well-known actress in the 1950s. One of Cabrera’s disappointments is that he probably will never make a movie with her.

Like him, she was deeply affected by their eight years in China, where his father was a diplomat. And like him, she joined the guerrillas when they returned to Colombia.

In her case, she was part of the urban militias that provide support in the cities for insurgents.

“In 1973, they caught her and she was in prison for a year and a half,” Cabrera said. “She was hurt that none of her colleagues visited her. When she got out, she did not want to act anymore.”

Those closest to him say that Cabrera is a demanding director.

“I like to work with him because he demands more of me, more than anyone else would, so I learn a lot,” said his 17-year-old daughter, Lili.

Lili Cabrera is the picture’s assistant art director, responsible for the small-town square and two streets of wooden storefronts that the crew built in less than a month.

“Estadio,” a co-production with Spain and Italy, has a $3-million budget. While minuscule by Hollywood standards, that is a major motion picture in Colombia.

The tight budget makes competing with foreign blockbusters tough. Cabrera’s first commercially distributed film, “Details of a Duel,” premiered in 1988 on the same day “Terminator” was released in Colombia.

“It was suicide,” Cabrera recalled. Only about 60,000 people saw his picture.

After that disaster, it took Cabrera six years to raise the money for his next film, “The Strategy of the Snail,” about a group of slum tenants who outwit their landlord. He filmed a few days at a time--as he could afford it--for three years.

The result was a movie that was seen by 1.5 million Colombians--a big hit here--and won prizes at several international festivals.

Criticism of His Substance and Style

Still, not all Colombians are enchanted with Cabrera’s films or his political campaign.

Alejandro Torres, film critic for the newspaper El Espectador, said “The Strategy of a Snail” was Cabrera’s last innovative movie.

“His films are political, but they aren’t terribly deep,” Torres said. “There are no great revelations. He relies on very general themes of violence and politics. His characters are more caricatures.”

Cabrera’s campaign is indicative of how desperate Colombians are to find candidates who have not been corrupted, said Mauricio Silva, film critic at El Tiempo, Colombia’s largest newspaper.

“It is as if [Quentin] Tarantino were running for Congress in the United States,” he said.

“The extreme left accuses him of being a traitor, and the ruling class sees him as someone dangerous,” Silva said. “His support comes from the middle class.”

On Sunday, Cabrera will find out whether that support will be enough to elect a born-again democrat to Congress.

“The truth is that I would rather do cinema and not politics, but my country hurts me,” Cabrera said. “It hurts me that my country is falling to pieces.”