CARIBBEAN FANTASY: HOW ONE FILMMAKER IS CHANGING THE NARRATIVE IN DOMINICAN CINEMA

Singlehandedly, Johanné Gomez has authored two of the most compelling and ground-breaking documentaries in the budding industry’s history, but we’re just recently hearing about it. 

You probably have never seen a Dominican documentary before. Nobody blames you for it. Dominican Republic is an international film destination with a powerful emerging industry dominated by family comedies and violent dramas, producing about a dozen of box-office effective titles every year and sometimes even achieving remarkable products such as the critically acclaimed Sand Dollars, and the tarantinesque but very local La Gunguna.

But documentary? Yeah… No, the category has been mostly populated by archive docu-pamphlets backed by some party’s political agenda. It’s not until the last couple of years that it was graced with the appearance of “Tú y Yo”, a festival darling by Natalia Cabral and Oriol Estrada, an intimate portrait of two women’s domestic relationship; and Tatiana Fernandez Geara’s “Nana”, another extremely intimate project exploring the ties and boundaries between Dominican nannies and the children they work with.

But Johanné Gomez Terrero, has taken her business to the streets, and the meanest while she’s at it. After she completed her studies in the prestigious film sanctuary San Antonio de los Baños, producing on her way out a short film that banged its way through the most prestigious festivals in the world, “Los Minutos, Las Horas”, she was only moved by the most urgent and dramatic of stories. In 2014 she completed a three years’ gut-ripping film project about the refugee camp in devastated post-earthquake Puerto Principe called “Bajo las carpas”, which follows the parallel stories of a young boy and a school teacher trying to survive in the tarp tent labyrinths the Haitian capital was reduced to. “Bajo las Carpas” proves from the first shot that Johanné has no fear of going further, deeper, eye-to-eye with a reality that’s usually only described, but never seen. The meaningful and heartfelt feature premiered in RDoc, a shiny and new jaw-dropping documentary festival that has come to redeem the scene in a country where art and entertainment awards are given altogether by social reporters and show biz columnist since the dawn of time. But Gomez’s film didn’t make a word of mouth. In a racism ridden half-island, the narratives of sister nation Haiti are regarded as a personal attack, specially in the heat of a migration turmoil that has enshrined the Dominican government as the heart of all evil as it withdrew citizenship to almost a century of in-land born Haitian descendants. And whereas this should add to the documentary’s value and meaning, it only causes that itchy discomfort even in the most broadly minded elites of the country’s art scene. So the film had a short festival run, but only because its author was getting ready to immerse in different waters

This year’s RDoc premiered Caribbean Fantasy, which features the love story between a married woman and a boatman in the Ozama river, the one that divides the city in two, and the deepest core of Santo Domingo’s marginality. The film explores and balances issues of morality, religion, mental health, education and feminism, all in the shivering setting of filthy riverside slums, and the poverty, contamination and social inequity in between. But let alone its formal purity, its impeccable execution and Johanné’s ability of putting the camera where none has been before, she succeeds at portraying the human dimension of this stained, impossible love. The story, unresolved, raises questions beyond the margins, and eyebrows at the depiction of misery without sensationalism or vulgarity.

“Caribbean Fantasy” is rich in symbolism and synthesis, and not for one second it abandons the excruciating reality of the characters, or its sophisticated contemporaneity. Johanné checkmarks a form of film that pierces through narratives of class in the Dominican imaginary, and calls it her own.

A poet from the slums, so to speak.

Written in April 19, 2016

Update: The film has just snatched the Mid-length max award at the Festival del Nuevo Cine Latinoamericano in Havana, Cuba, at the beginning of December 2016.