By Jeffrey Sipe and Nina Rodriguez
Documentaries come in all shapes and sizes. With “Cosas que no hacemos” (“Things We Dare Not Do”), Mexican director Bruno Santamaria embraces the long-form narrative tradition, ensconcing himself in a small town where he finds a narrative whose impact goes far beyond rural Mexico. Indeed, the film does take its time getting to that narrative, which isn’t surprising given Santamaria’s approach to filmmaking.
“With ‘Things We Dare Not Do,’ I was trying to talk about repression, how society stops us from doing the things that we want to,” Santamaria said in a recent interview. “That was the only thing that we knew when we started making the film. So, it was a bit difficult for the crew. They’d ask me all the time, ‘What are we doing?’ and I’d say, ‘I’m not sure, I just know the title and that it’s about things we dare not do.’ Then suddenly Arturo was there in front of me…I was waiting for things to happen, not pushing them to happen. With Arturo it was the same. Suddenly ‘she’ was in the middle of our eyes, and we’d ask what she was feeling and build the story around what she said.”
Arturo, 16, is called Ñoño in the film and often surrounded by much younger children, never by friends his own age. Then, in the only staged scene in the film, Ñoño retires to a secluded spot outside the village and, in extreme long-shot, we see her remove her clothes and pull on a dress, realizing her dream is to dress as a woman.
“What for me was so interesting,” Santamaria said, “was that it was a suggestion, a proposal from me to film a dream, but when we shot it, real things started to happen, and Arturo felt very emotional, very excited…We were playing, like kids play, but then real things started to happen.”
In a way, “Things We Dare Not Do” is a coming-of-age story in which the inevitable transformations of adolescence are layered with Ñoño facing her need to identify as a woman, a secret that ultimately transforms the film’s point-of-view from that of the town’s children to Ñoño’s. It also leads to an emotional climax in which she tells her parents, to whom she has already come out as gay, that her dream is to dress as a woman. Her father’s response—“If that is your dream, then you have to follow it”—is an impressive statement of the unqualified love and respect that parents owe their children.
Although Arturo/Ñoño becomes the film’s focus, the rest of the village’s children remain in the picture, as well, not only as they undergo the normal realizations that come with growing up but also as they become inured to the violence that infects their lives.
“Things We Dare Not Do” is a fly-on-the-wall take on the vicissitudes of growing up, made especially remarkable by Santamaria’s success in gaining the trust of all of the film’s subjects. It is an impressive example of what cinéma verité can accomplish.
The film is showing at Compartimento Cinematográfico, Calzada de la Estación 59, this Wednesday, October 12, kicking of a series of six free open-air screenings curated by the Guanajuato International Film Festival under the title of “Más Cine Mexicano, por favor.”
