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=Once Upon a Time in Bolivia=

Once Upon a Time in Bolivia (Spanish: Erase Una Vez en Bolivia) is a 2012 independent Bolivian road movie that was written, produced and directed by Patrick L Cordova. The Bolivian/British production is a Spanish-language film about the relationship between two half-brothers of mixed race who find themselves in a sprint to the Bolivia-Chile border. The film is set against a backdrop of the 2003 Bolivian gas conflict and was shot in the slums of El Alto and on El Altiplano in La Paz, Bolivia on a micro budget, using primarily non-professional actors.

Plot
Rocky, the older, illegitimate white son of a Bolivian mother and absent American father, returns home from prison to El Alto and the house he shares with his girlfriend and his also illegitimate indigenous half-brother, Nene.

Rocky and Nene’s relationship is strained and distant. Rocky pays little attention to his girlfriend and goads his half-brother. Nene reveals that his estranged father has left him a small plot of land as inheritance. Rocky takes an interest in visiting the land with his brother.

They visit the land and discover that it is a tiny and worthless slither of land in the middle of nowhere. While Nene laments his inheritance, Rocky mocks him for his naiveté. The brothers are ideologically oppossed when it comes to notions of national identity, their values, ideas about their native Bolivia and relationships. Rocky sees something during his visit to the land that intrigues him.

Rocky returns to the land the next day and discovers something buried there that leads him to flee for the Chilean border which is rumored to be closing due to the political turmoil around the gas conflict. Rocky encounters difficulties and is forced to call on his brother to help him to the border. Unbeknownst to Nene, in doing this, Nene is helping Rocky deceive him.

The brothers encounter numerous difficulties on their journey that strain their relationship even further, but the difficulties they encounter force them to find common ground in the interests of getting themselves to the border on time. The obstacles they encounter are a micrcosm of some of the contemporaneous social and economic problems that face Bolivians.

Cast

 * Luis Caballero as Rocky, Nene’s half-brother
 * Miguel Angel Mamani as Nene, Rocky’s half-brother
 * Ivan Nogales as The Hitcher
 * Raul Beltran as Red Hat, the bounty hunter
 * Miguel Estellano as the cop who interrogates Rocky and Nene
 * Roxanna as Rocky’s girlfriend
 * Reynaldo Yuhra in a cameo as a Miner
 * Patrick L Cordova in a cameo.

Crew

 * Written, Directed & Produced by Patrick L Cordova
 * Cinematography by Dani Landau
 * Editing by Nahuel Attar
 * Sound by Simon Schwartz

Release
The film premiered in private viewings in the US and UK in 2012.

History
Bolivia holds the second-largest natural gas reserve in South America. As one of South America’s poorest countries, Bolivia is especially dependent upon exporting its natural resources abroad, and during the late 1990s-early 2000s, natural gas became a particularly lucrative source of income. Economic reforms, including the privatization of many public companies and liberalization of energy policies in the mid-1980s allowed the country’s economy to grow fairly steadily. Despite this, poverty in Bolivia remains widespread.

The controversy over control of this resource is further complicated by the geographic and social divide in Bolivia. The country’s natural gas fields are concentrated in the wealthier eastern provinces and urban areas among businessmen with strong ties to the developed world, with little trickle down to the poorer, rural areas. Bolivians of indigenous descent make up the majority of the third of the population in Bolivia who live on less than one dollar per day. Such inequality has led to seemingly constant protests over control of Bolivia’s natural gas. Similar conflicts have persisted over the years with control over Bolivia’s water supply.

The Bolivian Gas Conflict refers to a series of incidents in 2003. The social conflict escalated with protests and road blockages paralyzing large parts of the country, leading to increasingly violent confrontations with the Bolivian armed forces. The insurrection was spearheaded by Bolivia's indigenous majority, who accused President Gonzalo Sánchez de Lozada (“Goni”) of colluding with the US government about crackdowns on Coca farmers and blamed him for failing to improve living standards in Bolivia. During September, the protests began with thousands of Aymaras effecting a hunger strike to protest against the state detention of a villager. Tensions rose when the National Coordination for the Defense of Gas mobilized 30,000 people in Cochabamba and 50,000 in La Paz to demonstrate against the pipeline. The following day, protesters were killed in a confrontation in the town of Warisata. In response to the shootings, Bolivia's Labor Union (COB) called a general strike on September 29 that paralyzed the country with road closures. Eugenio Rojas, leader of the regional strike committee, declared that if the government refused to negotiate in Warisata, then the insurgent Aymara communities would surround La Paz and cut it off from the rest of the country.

As the protests continued, protesters in El Alto, a sprawling indigenous city of 750,000 people on the periphery of La Paz, proceeded to block key access routes to the capital causing severe fuel and food shortages. They also demanded the resignation of Sánchez de Lozada, who was the main architect of the privatization and deregulation of Bolivia’s economy before he became president (Privatization in Bolivia). In October 2003, he resigned and fled the country to the United States.

Depiction in film
Once Upon a Time in Bolivia uses the protests and gas conflicts as context and backdrop to the strained relationship between Rocky and Nene. While the filmmakers never show a first-person view of the protests, we see their effect on the country. The conflict within the country finds a metaphor in the relationship between the contrasting personalities, beliefs and cultures of the two half-brothers. The differing values and culture of each brother inform the identities and personalities of the two brothers. Their development of their relationship is the emotional core of the film, and navigating and negotiating the troubled relationship drives the main narrative thread of the film.

Other films that seek to show a similar conflict are Even the Rain, which focuses primarily on protesters and activists rather than the non-active civilian population.

The film’s place in Bolivian cinema
Once Upon a Time in Bolivia has a specific place in the context of Latin American film and evolution of Bolivian cinema. Firstly, it was one of the first Bolivian films to project a culturally plural national identity in Bolivia’s national cinema. Bolivian films have traditionally depicted national identity as either indigenous or white, divided along similar economic lines. In particular, adherents to Third Cinema such as Jorge Sanjines have taken a socialist revolutionary stance and made oppositional films. In “Once Upon a Time in Bolivia”, the relationship between the two brothers is a metaphor for the long standing racial and social tension within Bolivia, but the film then transcends it by putting forward a culturally and socially plural national identity that is reconcilitory and defined by its rich, dynamic and progressive qualities.

Secondly, it was the first Bolivian film to move away from both the populist film/genre models (Hollywood and comedic theatro popular) and the socialist arthouse model that have dominated modern Bolivian cinema (cf ¿Quién mató a la llamita blanca? and Zona Sur as examples of these two opposites). (A third but less popular component of current Bolivian cinema is the “auteur cinema”. Instead, this film blends Third Cinema with arthouse realism, genre and narrative form in a manner that creates a new model for Bolivian cinema.  The film’s aesthetic embraces indigenous, Spanish white and western values in a manner that remains culturally plural and authentically Bolivian.

Thirdly, the film was the first to depict the Bolivian Gas Conflict in a fictional drama. Film as a medium for political comment is a characteristic from the tradition of film-making exemplified by Jorge Sangines, Jorge Ruiz, and José María Velasco Maidana. The key difference in Once Upon a Time in Bolivia is both the film’s and the character’s insistence that the political is personal, not racial, and that individual fates and identities can be shaped by choice and action. Rocky maintains that Bolivia is tearing itself apart, stuck in conflict and unable to move forward. He sees the US and “Western” influence as not necessarily a bad thing; he encapsulates the spirit of a free-market economy, not considering the morality or ethical nature of his actions. Nene, on the other hand, represents a more holistic and selfless point of view, believing in the essential goodness of the people who are only reacting to living under an unfair government in an unequal society.