Intimidad is a documentary film that weaves together a mix of home movie, cinema verite, and informal interview footage to present a portrait of Cecy and Camilo Ramirez, and their daughter Loida, a hard-working, young family living in Reynosa, Mexico.
This weekend I interviewed David Redmon and Ashley Sabin, after their New England premiere of Intimidad at the Independent Film Festival of Boston. Ashley and David made Intimidad made over the course of five years. In the story Cecy and Camilo Ramirez dream of buying land and building their own house. The film presents an unflinching view of living on minimum wage with very little infrastructure and the sacrifices and hardships the family must endure to survive.
I really liked the film, and I think it points to an evolution in documentary form, a new genre in which subjects are able to take on more of the process of making the documentary since filmmakers can give their subjects inexpensive cameras to shoot some of the film themselves. In Intimidad Ashley and David use it to good effect, as Cecy and Camilo captured some intimate moments amongst themselves that the filmmakers could not capture. While this raises lots of interesting issues in terms of ethics, subjectivity, authorship, etc., I see it as a positive evolution, part of the macro forces we’re experiencing in our culture as we move out of the era of auteur filmmakers and broadcast models of media distribution and into an era of more collaborative authorship and social network-based models of distribution. This is very much part of the decentralization of media structures that McLuhan wrote about in the 60s.
Note: The interview was posted at kino-eye.com/2008/10/18/intimidad-interview/.