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| Martin in a scene from The Night Watchman. |
By John Esther
The latest documentary by Natalia Almada (To the Other Side; El General), few films or documentaries laboriously and quietly examine the life of the working poor as well as The Night Watchman (El Velador).
Set in the infamous Cualican cemetery called "El Jardin" ("The Garden"), the night watchman, Martin, and others construct crass gravesites and mausoleums for the victims -- or soldiers ("capos"), depending on how one looks at it -- murdered as a result of the highly profitable narcotic trafficking in the northern Mexico area. Day by day, under the sun, gravediggers, bricklayers, cleaning women, food vendors, etc., do their low-paying jobs as the rich are put to rest. Without visible exception, the ones doing the work have already existed longer than the recently deceased.
Rather than explore the more visibly sensationalized aspects of drug trafficking, the documentary maintains its focus on the aftermath of violence. Almada never investigates the live and death of the victims or their families beyond the tributes (pictures, personal belongings, etc.) the latter have made at the burial plot. (However, there is one chilling scene where a mother wails over her son's death off-camera as we watch workers continue creating future burial sites.) Instead Almada focuses on the mind-numbing days and nights of Martin and the workers as they earn their meek wages caring por los nuevos ricos muerto, whose extermination brings the trabajadores a little steady income. To put it more bluntly than the documentary does: in this rare incidence, murder is good business for the working poor.
Although there were only about 40 people attending the Sunday night screening at the Los Angeles Film Festival, despite its method of deconstructing some of the destruction and construction due to violence, I only noticed one person leaving this unusually poetic documentary before it was over.
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