-By Maria Garcia

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Alamar begins with the Coliseum in Rome, and soon shifts to the interior of an old bus, the kind with latched windows and a transistor radio on the dash. This passage from the Old World to the New is accompanied by a soothing hum, and then the crunching of wheels on an unpaved road. Transported beyond Western constraints of architecture and technology, we are suddenly in the open air and sea of Mundo Maya, the dwelling place of Central America’s indigenous people. The journey is Natan’s (Natan Machado Palombini), a five-year-old boy who travels from his home in Rome ala mar (“to the sea”), and into the wilds of the Yucatán Peninsula. Through the child’s eyes, we experience a littoral paradise as an unpredictable place, one that only a father who knows the habits of untamed nature can gently transform into a lasting memory.

Natan’s parents, Roberta (Roberta Palombini Machado), an Italian, and Jorge (Jorge Machado), a Mexican Maya, met when Roberta was on vacation in Mexico. They separated after Natan was born, when they realized that neither could share the other’s lifestyle. That is the documentary part of the story, which Mexican director Pedro González-Rubio (Toro Negro) cleverly introduces in still photographs, accompanied by Roberta’s voiceover, at the start of the movie. The filmmaker met the couple after moving to Playa del Carmen, a resort whose uncontrolled development threatens nearby Banco Chinchorro, the protected biosphere where Alamar was shot and where Jorge is a guide. With a simple, cerulean backdrop of Caribbean and sky, broken occasionally by the clapboard planes of a palafitte, González-Rubio spins his tale of transience. If we think of the scripted unfolding of the story as fictional or dramatic, it is only in the manner of Robert Flaherty’s Nanook of the North. Events are plotted and staged, but they are inspired by the actual lives of the characters.

Jorge has only a summer to share the fleeting beauty of Banco Chinchorro’s barrier reef with Natan, who will never again be the impressionable age he is at this moment. Their host, Matraca, an agile but aging fisherman whose only home is the palafitte, embodies the impermanence of the reef and all the living things it supports. In this mutable environment, Matraca shields the growing affection between father and son—it is his knowledge of the sea that ensures both food and shelter. Although the relationship between Matraca and Jorge is never explained, Matraca’s wisdom is echoed in Jorge’s patient tutelage of his young son. Jorge teaches Natan to earn the trust of a visiting egret dubbed “Blanquita,” and to snorkel so that he can glimpse the reef. At one point, Matraca’s fishing skills outshine Jorge’s, and in a moment of insecurity, Jorge, who is maybe 30, needles Matraca about his senescence. The old man smiles; he has long confronted his own mortality.

In one of the most memorable scenes in Nanook of the North, the Inuit hero carves a remarkably beautiful bear from the Arctic ice in order to give his young son his first hunting lesson. González-Rubio took advantage of the unexpected arrival of the egret, and Jorge’s ease with wild creatures, to create a similarly enchanting episode. Jorge induces the bird to perch on his arm so that Natan may touch her feathers, illustrating to his son the docility necessary to live in harmony with nature. These sequences, portraits of idealized masculine bonding, in which men pass on their knowledge to boys, may appear timeless, but actually they are evanescent. While they survive on celluloid, the boy, the man, the sea, and Blanquita herself will never again exist as they do in Alamar—nor does the Inuit life Flaherty captured. If there is wistfulness in Alamar, it is tempered by the sensibilities of Jorge and Matraca, and by Natan’s innocence. The men and the boy live in the present, in a way that it is difficult for anyone in the modern world to imagine.

Through the simplicity of plot, setting and method—Alamar was made with a two-person crew and one HD camera—we find ourselves in a temporal universe, one seemingly free of artifice, in which it is possible to wend our way into the psyche of a small boy. When, near the end of the film, Natan is drawing pictures of the creatures he’s encountered and he is asked what he will remember, he recounts each of them, and then he says: “The camera.” Photography as self-reflection, for Natan, whose psyche is not yet divided into selfhood and objective experience, remains undifferentiated from what he is witnessing at any given moment. Including the camera in a list of fish and birds, the boy articulates González-Rubio’s aesthetic, or his lack of it, which lies at the core of Alamar.

Like every filmmaker who seeks authenticity, González-Rubio expands cinema’s suspension of disbelief by working in a way that removes the camera from the consciousness of his protagonists, thereby creating the illusion of direct experience for his audience. The writer-director’s inclusion of Natan’s remark is self-reflexive; it expresses the folly of that naturalness, as well as the nexus of fiction and nonfiction which characterizes Alamar. It is also an acknowledgment that Alamar springs from his own preoccupations, and not those of a five year-old, in its overwhelming sense of uncertainty and transience. Back in Rome, Natan sits on a wall at Gianicolo Hill with Roberta and blows soap bubbles in the air. The graffiti on the wall reads, “You are my present,” expressing the wish of a man for a perfect love to stave off oblivion, not that of a boy for whom there is nothing but now.