Ricardo Bär is a 22 year-old young man who lives with his family in a small farm in Misiones, at the border between Brazil and Argentina. Like many settlers there, he’s a descendant of German immigrants. Unlike most of them, he has a very personal calling: he wants to become a pastor instead of merely inheriting his father’s land. His is a project that speaks of growing up, rather than following in the footsteps of somebody else.
At the same time, a film crew headed by directors Gerardo Naumann and Nele Wohlatz is making a documentary about Ricardo and the community at large, which was born out of the curiosity of Wohlatz — herself born in Germany and about to move to Argentina — to find out how these German settlers had adapted to the area. At first, the filmmakers have a hard time gaining peoples’ trust to both let them shoot the film and take part in it. Slowly things seem to change and the film is underway.
But sooner rather than later, the townspeople change their minds and ask the German crew to stop shooting and leave the place at once. They say the filmmakers have been invasive, they have worn inappropriate clothing when attending church, have disrespected their rules and lifestyle. So Naumann and Wohlatz pack up and leave. Yet they keep on thinking of ways to go back and keep shooting. And they come up with a great idea: considering how badly Ricardo wants to become a pastor, wouldn’t it be great if he had a scholarship to study Theology at a well-known official institution in Buenos Aires?
Once they’ve gotten the scholarship with said institution, they contact Ricardo and the townspeople to negotiate a new permit to make the documentary in exchange for the scholarship. That’s their pitch — and also the fact that the film will be of great use for them to show outsiders what the mission and values of the community are. The people accept and the film is in progress once again.
That’s pretty much the general outline of the striking Argentine documentary Ricardo Bär, written and directed by Gerardo Naumann and Nele Wohlatz, and previously screened at the BAFICI and other major international film festivals as well. It’s quite a singular film not only because of the virtually unknown territory it unveils, with all its gripping characters with atypical traits, but mostly because of how it represents the very process and difficulties of documentary making. Not only the logistic problems, which sometimes are indeed hard to solve, but mostly the ones related to the thin frontier that divides reality from fiction, and true-to-life situations from reenactments.
Ricardo’s life, as well as that of the community, is both captured as is and staged for the camera. Not that you can always tell the difference because Ricardo Bär, the film, deliberately toys with the respective zones of indetermination. Moreover, it accounts for the fully alive nature of documentary making, since this is a film which is constantly reshaped according to the changes that reality exposes the filmmakers to. So it’s not just a matter of choosing what to depict within this vast scenario, but how to depict a scenario that’s in constant transformation. A film in-the-making per definition.
To make the entire matter all the more appealing, the story is not told in chronological order. It teases viewers, leading them to believe they are watching a straight story, but halfway through the film viewers learn they are in view of a zigzagging story that moves back and forth in time. You could even say there are two films in one, at least.
The best thing is that this is no empty exercise in modern narrative, but instead it’s the finest way to narrate everything that took place in the character study of one peculiar young man, as well as the portrayal of a religious culture of German origins but with Argentine roots, with folks that speak portuñol (a mix of Spanish and Portuguese), and yet in many cases they feel they belong to Argentina as much as they belong to Germany.
