Arribeños is the name of a well known street in the neighbourhood of Belgrano, which years ago was part of a quiet middle-upper class residential area with few stores, restaurants, or even coffee shops. And while today the street largely remains that way, since the late 1990s a change has been taking place on the two blocks between Juramento and Olazábal: the Barrio Chino (Chinatown) now sits there, a busy commercial section where different generations of Chinese and Taiwanese people have settled.
Arribeños is also the name of the cleverly written and directed documentary by Marcos Rodríguez (La educación gastronómica) and delightfully photographed by Ada Frontini (Escuela de sordos), which places a candid, clear, and sometimes intimate gaze at a universe otherwise known only from the outside. Not that Arribeños is a behind-the-scenes work about how business and deals are conducted in Barrio Chino, but in its place — and far more interestingly — is a comprehensive exploration of how the different types of migrants (and their descendants) live and relate to others in a place of their own that blends in the local culture. It’s in the human element where Rodríguez’s documentary finds its unique inspiration.
As in most documentaries, there are many testimonies, but unlike most documentaries they are not conveyed in a conventional manner. Instead, they are communicated exclusively via voice over while stylishly images of the area are shown — so the usual boring talking heads are not to be seen.
And these voices carry different feelings and thoughts from diverse folks: there are those who hardly speak Spanish, those who strive hard to learn it whereas others actually care more for Mandarin and Taiwanese. Also, there are those who feel they are downright Argentine, those who are homesick and still wish they’d go back, and some who are lingering somewhere in between.
What’s most gripping is how effortlessly all these people open up for the filmmaker and how the filmmaker must have asked the right questions to get them to address common issues as well as singular details that define the many layers of an identity both established and in the making. You’d think that a string of statements would become tedious at one point or another, and yet that’s not the case at all. Much attention has been paid to language so what is said and how it’s said is never anecdotic or redundant.
And there’s the alluring interplay with visuals. Frontini’s cinematography avoids clichés and often goes for large static and frontal shots that provide an overall view of the neighbourhood, its shops and diners. Imagine pictures of bright colours with an assortment of shapes and textures that come across as a living backdrop for the verbal stories. No specific actions are depicted; it’s not necessarily about showing people doing this or that for the camera. Instead, it’s about informally showing people with their things in their milieus just as they are. Original, insightful and far from solemn, Arribeños is a different and accomplished experience in the field of the ever increasing creative documentaries that seek to sing their own songs.
Production notes
Arribeños (Argentina, 2015). Written and directed by Marcos Rodríguez. With José Tseng, Máximo Li, Margarita Xie, Ana Kuo, Susana Cheng, Hugo Wu, Gustavo Ng, Antonio Lang, Carlos Ling, Roxana Huang, Lin Hsiao Chen. Cinematography: Ada Frontini. Editing: Matías Mercuri, Federico Mercuri. Running time: 76 minutes.
@pablsuarez
