Director: Angelina Fernandez
Running time: 30mins
I don’t think Indy Film Library has ever covered a career-pivot as drastic as the one Angelina Fernandez has completed. Six years on from her enjoyably bizarre experimental sci-fi-noir Hard…BOILED!!!, it’s hard to imagine a film further removed from that legacy than A Mano (which translates as By Hand) – a slow-moving documentary following a team of construction workers as they build a house by hand in Mexico.
Over the course of 30 minutes, Fernandez and her own crew capture some truly exquisite imagery, pairing it with an intimate insight into the working relationships of the builders. We hear stories of hardship, antagonism, kindness and camaraderie from the labourers – as each of them explains not only why they are able to survive such gruelling work and difficult conditions; but why they have fallen in love with it.
There is a danger that a production with such technical polish could veer into romanticising working class life as an object of middle-class escapism. It is all too common that someone with a fancy camera and a big crew will ‘slum it’ for a few days to capture a slice of an edgier life, without meaning to engage with it beyond the street-credit it might earn them. A Mano is not among that order, though, and tirelessly consults with its subjects to tap into their own feelings around their lives. It’s not inherently nice work – and certainly it is not a place where any middle-class escapist will find solace just by virtue of getting their hands dirty. Surviving here is all about long-term, meaningful ties through shared material struggles.
One man explains that when he first began working in the trade, he hated it – giving a particularly grisly note that the things he had to carry were so heavy that they made his bones “slide”. But a mixture of building his own house – showing him that each part of the process could be done “with love” – and the support of his colleagues eventually saw him change his opinion. Another builder notes that he came into the trade following his brother, who moved the family across the country to escape his abusive father. Now he regards those he works alongside each day as his best friends.
Not all the stories are so dramatic, but they all share a common thread, in that each man has found a crucial form of solidarity in his fellow workers, that helps him get through the day. Even if that is just surviving the crushing banality we all suffer in the repetitive tasks we do to pay the bills, the conversations, jokes and disagreements they have with each other help to prove that at least they aren’t alone in it all.
These themes never outstay their welcome, with each segment impeccably paced – and paired with images of almost therapeutic movements that quite a few viewers will probably enjoy. Admittedly I’ve always found the process of laying bricks and mortar strangely mesmerising, and I think that probably is the same for a lot of people. I don’t mean in the sense that some people tag images of Subway Surfer to unrelated videos just so there is enough movement for younger generations to be able to concentrate. More that it’s an echo back to watching my grandfather construct various projects in our garden – that’s a wonderful memory, and one which again helps to tie us to everything the workers are feeling and saying.
That description of the imagery is probably too simple, too. The photography work of Mariana Mora, Christian Orozco and Leo Hernández deserves much more specific praise, because it is thoroughly beautiful from start to finish. The camera captures so many disarmingly simple but affecting images: silhouetted figures patiently stacking bricks against the untainted blue of the Mexican sky; a red-brown haze enveloping a young man as he excavates what will be the house’s foundations; a timelapse image of shadows of new windows sweeping across the wooden floor as the sun moves through the sky.
Most pleasingly to me, however, is noticing the areas in which you can still see this is the same filmmaker who gave us Hard…Boiled!!!. That film was built on layered images – using chewed up pop-culture to construct a breathing world in a green-screen studio. Fernandez still, sparingly, deploys that technique here – working with editors Samantha Robles and Juan Carlos Rendón not only to set up the pleasant and well-organised montage of shots you would expect to see in a film like this, but to overlap and intersplice them! Sometimes a shot of one of the talking heads will float in the middle of a screen, while some great task is being carried out in a separate shot behind it – lending weight to the words with every thud of an axe, scrape of a shovel, or splat of mortar.
That visual-collage method is one which I would have liked to have seen spread more consistently throughout the film – as much as I enjoy the conventional imagery. But even appearing only a handful of times, it still gives the film a unique editorial stamp that says this isn’t just a run-of-the-mill documentary; it is an Angelina Fernandez documentary. I hope we get to see a few more of those over the years, because this is something special.