DESIERTO ADENTRO / THE DESERT WITHIN

Mexico, 2008, 110 minutes, Colour.
Mario Zaragoza, Diego Catano.
Directed by Rodrigo Pla.

Desierto Adentro is set in the 1920s to the 1940s in Mexico. It was a period of fierce anticlericalism and persecution of the Catholic church. (Memories of Graham Greene’s The Power and the Glory).

The film opens in the 1920s with the suppression of the Catholic church, soldiers coming into villages, decapitating statues, forbidding people to wear religious emblems, sending the priests into the city – and executing many of those who did not obey orders.

Elias is the father of a family, quite devout in his way, whose wife is pregnant and in pain. He goes to the city to persuade the parish priest who had been exiled to come back and baptise the child. When he comes back, he blesses the mother, has to hide, but is arrested – and taken out and put before a firing squad to be shot.

Several of his family are also executed at the time and Elias starts to blame himself. The film is divided into several sections: guilt, repentance, the sign, the sign that did not come. This traces Elias’s religious experience as he takes his family into exile, builds a church over many years as a sign of repentance. He also keeps the child born from his dead wife inside, virtually a prisoner.

As the years pass, the boy grows older, has been in the care of his sister Micaela. When he gets out, they have a passionate relationship – which the father discovers and continues to blame himself and his children.

However, the boy questions this image of God. Elias’s God is a vindictive God – he punishes himself, even whipping himself, continually doing penance. However, disillusioned, he breaks down the church that he has built. His son is finally able to give voice to an alternate image of God, one who is merciful and forgiving, speaking of his father’s wrong beliefs.

The film has a dramatic location, in the village, in the desert. The film also uses animation many times throughout the film, summarising Elias’s story, the paintings of his son, as well as having Jesus talk from a crucifix. This gives a sense of surrealism to the plot and the characterisation.

Rodrigo Pla has made few films, but many of them significant including La Zona, La Demora. La Demora and Desierto Adentro have received awards from Signis, the World Catholic Association for Communication.