A crocodile’s corpse is not something I ever thought I would have sympathy for — but then again, I never thought he’d do it, he being a man world-worn and toothpick-thin. A better student of anatomy would be able to chart the sinewy fibers in the hunter’s back and arms, how they sway with each tense moment. As he ties up the crocodile to be skinned and sold for meat and parts, I felt the documentary I was watching beg the question out of me: “Is cruelty necessary for survival?”
To The West, In Zapata is the story of a single family in the swamps of Zapata, Cuba: Landi, who travels to the local swamp every few days to hunt crocodiles for money, and his wife Mercedes, who stays at home and takes care of their child Deinis (who has special needs while also going out to retrieve carbon. Directed by David Bim in his debut feature, this documentary is a story of a family, fractured, told in two parts. Part 1 is dedicated to Landi’s week in the swamp, while Part 2 is dedicated to Mercedes’s life with Deinis in the home. Despite Landi’s cyclical return and departure, I would argue that Deinis, the delightful and adventurous boy, is the heart of the film.
Bim came across the family while hiking in his 20s, when he stopped to ask Mercedes for some water. In part from youthful splendor, in part from loving hospitality, he ended up staying on a couch in their house. The idea for the film came from the dichotomy within Mercedes: a woman who held tremendous strength and fragility in both palms, having to hold together parenting and a household while Landi leaves for the swamp. I found myself constantly thinking about the younger versions of these people, and who they were before the world made them into these versions of themselves — did Merced ever dream of pretty dresses and public dances? Did Landi ever have a Stretch Armstrong figurine and play pirates with his friends in the grass?
Landi and Mercedes’s dynamic feels endlessly fascinating as a viewer. Their separation guides the film, both emotionally and cinematographically. One feels almost a sense of freedom in the first part, watching Landi maneuver through the swamp out of pure necessity, guided by instinct, accompanied only by a director with a camera. He eats rice that he cooks over a campfire, drinks water from a stream, and sleeps under a mosquito net in a tent. In some of the best cinematic sound design of the year, Landi’s section of the film is a quiet one, the rhythm of the nature around him orchestrated during mixing to become its own symphony: the flies buzzing crescendos as the sparks of fire die out, and the footsteps slogging along the floor of the swamp as the thump of the alligator’s head goes silent, all soundtracked by the radio blaring the same news of Cuba during the pandemic. In contrast, Merced’s life is loud; we are introduced to her screaming her son’s name. Throughout her section of the film, there is an immediate loudness — loud bursts of the small town’s noises, Deinis’s occasional words. No sound feels premeditated, ever. The cacophony of this second part is accompanied by the grueling labor of Merced’s life as she holds up a household, takes care of a child, and goes to retrieve carbon for the house, all without any partner’s support and her own body ailing.
In a Q&A after the film, Bim explained that he draws inspiration from Dostoyevsky’s idea of characters never standing still, always walking. Idleness is a luxury in the world of Bim, where Landi is shot walking with a crocodile corpse held to his back as he traverses the swamp with no map, only the memory of the way back to the base camp where Mercedes walks along a beach holding Deinis in her arms and wading through water up to her stomach without so much as a flinch. The constant action and addition of a highly curated sound design create a film that, despite being shot in black and white, feels warm, rich, and personal. The lack of color highlights the wear on each subject’s face, heightening the emotional textures of the film rather than the physical ones.
As I posed in the introduction, this film is an exercise in exploring non-malicious cruelty. Landi having to leave is merely a fact of his family’s survival, despite how Mercedes struggles without him and with the expectations left to her. A crocodile dies in a rudimentary, painful way in order to be sold for money and medicine. Perhaps the true “cruelty” of the film is the existence of this divide between them, created by necessity. The small moments that Landi and Mercedes steal when he is back home are too fleeting to tide them over until they see each other again. In face of the strife, there is love, and that in and of itself is a win over circumstance.
The writer would like to give special thanks to Business Iceland for facilitating this coverage.
