In any case, though, the only film on which we slightly disagree is ALAMAR, a movie that was certainly a festival highlight and, as I referred to it at Slant, undeniably an “an aural-visual masterpiece” with subtly but indelibly investigated ecological and familial ideas. As you write, “…we must also grant that it’s thoroughly imbued with a place and culture which preclude that sort of artistic intentionality. That is, it knows itself. It is fundamentally unforced. Is that a Bible the old man is reading? This is the work of a masterful observer, not a brilliant director.”

I’m still uncertain how to unpack the observer/director distinction. I agree, of course, that it’s there, and that the film could not have been made by anyone without a documentarian’s sense of capturing the moment precluding the fictive director’s sense of controlling the microcosm. González-Rubio “writes” ALAMAR with his patient camerawork rather than with words or even with psychological inquiry; these characters cannot be “penetrated” or “understood” or “read”–they’re too archetypal, too prototypical, too gloriously rudimentary in both literary and cosmic senses for them to function as anything but “beings,” and we get off on the absence of symbolism and narrative doubt because it’s a powerful existential affirmation (the primary conflict here is a nearly tribal mourning over a soon-to-be absent child without any further subtext). This is part of the movie’s power. We don’t feel like these are characters who exist for our intellectual/moral/dramatic pleasure. And when films achieve this kind of diegetic autonomy they seemingly, and monumentally, stand apart from most of the traditions of western performance (cinema might be the only art form that can manage this, though that’s another discussion).

What’s bothersome is the nebulous line between faked art and well-bottled poeticism. It matters not that the family of ALAMAR is real, or that the father isn’t really a fisherman, or the boy isn’t really in Italy today. What matters is how these fictive elements obfuscate the raw earthiness of the scenarios that somehow González-Rubio both stages and allows to happen. In this way it’s actually similar to your own debut film, AROUND THE BAY, which I recently saw — the cameras and the actors are all given the freedom to find their own sweet spots so long as they operate within the boundaries of a pre-determined structure. But with ATB, the murmuring plot and inter-character conflicts were necessary–the form and content there had to be chained to a story before they could be lyrically liberated from it. With ALAMAR I feel the imposition of the “last daddy boat trip” a bit too much — it’s a dramatic catalyst, yes, but at what cost? Do we imagine the Gulf salt in the air any more vividly? Is the buried mysticism of the primitive, sustainable fishing techniques any more spellbinding?

I realize in writing this that my criticism of the film is almost indefensibly anal — because ALAMAR is neither a fudged-fact documentary or a contemplative “based-on-a-true-story” fiction (it’s somewhere in-between even those two compromised sub-genres, lost in tone-poem land) it gives me hermeneutical indigestion. And regardless of its difficult categorization, it is, most definitely, a very, very good film. But I’ll end with a response to something the director mentioned during his Q&A — while he rightfully proposed that the blend of fact and fiction is subordinate to the on-screen content, I’d go a step further. What matters isn’t what’s on the screen, either — it’s what’s in front of the camera. ALAMAR has one of the most nuanced, meditative, and crucially respectful camera-to-scene relationships I’ve ever witnessed in the movies, so the moments where that partnership seemed strained or at risk (most notably during the custody details and the opening and closing scenes) were downright devastating.

Then again, this might be yet another of the film’s gifts: Its successful moments are so supernally captivating we demand the same perfection of the remainder.