LATIMES.COM/CALENDAR SUNDAY, AUGUST 25, 2019E3
It is 1986 in Mexico City. A year
after an 8.0 magnitude earthquake
has reduced parts of the city to rub-
ble. The longtime ruling party, the
Partido Revolucionario Institu-
cional, still clings to power. In the
decade before Mexico would open
itself to the world, it is a moment of
stifling isolation.
In the midst of this, a disaffected
17-year-old named Carlos is discov-
ering new worlds in an under-
ground art and music scene where
suffocating societal mores do not
apply.
This is the world of director Hari
Sama’s new feature film, “This Is
Not Berlin,” which premiered Fri-
day in Los Angeles. The story is
loosely inspired by the director’s
youth, when he found solace from
family troubles in New Wave music
and the dance floor of a queer
dance club that was also as a popu-
lar site for art and performance.
Here, among the friends he consid-
ered family, he experimented with
music, drugs and sexuality.
“For a couple of years I was try-
ing to be gay without being gay,” he
says via a Skype call from Mexico
City. “My coming out of the closet
was like, ‘Oh, I’m straight.’ ”
Sama’s stand-in in the movie is
Carlos (played by the alluring Xabi-
ani Ponce de León), who with his
best friend, Gera (José Antonio
Toledano), stumbles into an under-
ground party that will forever
change his life. Playing Carlos’ trou-
bled mother is the Oscar-nomi-
nated Marina de Tavira, who ap-
peared in Alfonso Cuarón’s
“Roma.”
Mexico City’s underground art
and culture scene also has a star-
ring role. “This Is Not Berlin” is rife
with visceral performance — think
nudity, blood, sledgehammers (not
necessarily in that order). And it
gives a nod to an obscure art space
that served as an important prov-
ing ground.
put people in a factory and then
they’d close the doors and do this
unbelievable [stuff]. It was incred-
ibly violent. They came to Mexico
City in the ’80s and were very influ-
ential. I tried to reproduce a ver-
sion of a performance they did in
the film where they are breaking
cars; there were people throwing
blood. That was something I really
saw.
That was all in a house that
belonged to the Quiñones brothers
— la Quiñonera — and it became
really important to everything. It
was these brothers who inherited
this house when they were only 19;
their father moved to Cuernavaca.
And they started renting the house
for parties and rock bands.
They started curating these
exhibits in the garden and these
very young artists were doing
things: Gabriel Orozco and
Damián Ortega, before anyone
knew them. Teresa Margolles also
came out of there.
Gabriel Orozco did this thing
where he moved the bougainvillea
from one side of the house to the
other side of the house. He was
experimenting. You could see the
seeds of what came later. I man-
aged to shoot there for the film.What about the nightclub you
feature in the film, the Aztec.
What is that based on?
The Aztec was inspired by le
Neuf in the Zona Rosa, the gay
area, and a little bit by a club called
the Tutti Frutti, where they played
music. At le Neuf, the owner — he
was a French guy — loved art and
he opened it to performance and
gay culture. It was very theatrical.
You’d be seeing all of these pansex-
ual people in these outfits. It didn’t
matter if you were male or female,
everyone had their eyes painted. It
would go on until 8 in the morning.
But I also drew from a meaning-
ful trip I made to New York City
with my brother. New York City
was wonderful in the ’80s, and one
of the little clubs we went to wascalled the Aztec Lounge. All the
walls were painted in colors that
came out with blacklight — these
skulls. You would listen to the
Smiths and the Cure and to under-
ground stuff. It was wonderful.How did you end up at le Neuf to
begin with?
At some point I met a family
that was a very important family to
me. They had a composer father
from Scandinavia who was a crazy
intellectual. And they had a gay
friend who had been to the Neuf.
So we went and they let us in. And
we were like, whatis this? We were
like hippies. We had long hair and
some of us didn’t have shoes. I was
out of time, out of place. But when I
found these people, I became a
New Wave, post-punk guy with the
black nail polish. I was all glam.
This club opened the doors to
all of the outcasts in the city. So it
was very important. I don’t think it
housed more than 200 people. It
was very small. I came to know all
of these people there — my best
friend from the time, he was a
painter and he died in 1990 or ’91. I
have one of his paintings in the
film.What was it like to revisit this
period of your life?
It’s been crazy. We started
shooting in the suburbs, with what
would have been my house, and I
started feeling very moved. It was
very intense. And now the film is
out there and it is thing that is me
and it is being judged. But all of
these serious contemporary artists
taught me that it was good to be
vulnerable in my work. It’s very
powerful to do that — it’s people
using frailty in such a strong way.
And it’s empowering to honor that
and let it go.
Looking back, the size of this —
it was very small. In Madrid, there
were like 20 clubs. We had le Neuf.
It was a verytiny seed. But even if
it was a tiny thing, it was still a
seed.In this interview, Sama recalls
the art and events that shaped him
and his film. Of the era, he says: “It
felt like freedom.”What was it about Mexico City in
’80s that you wanted to examine?
The thing with Mexico is that it
was a dictatorship, but it was
expressed so differently from any-
where else in Latin America. This
was not a military dictatorship.
From the outside, the country
looked open. But the repression
was huge.
Rock concerts were forbidden.
Gatherings of young people were
forbidden. You had ’68 [the mili-
tary massacre of protesters at
Tlatelolco] and then you had ’71
[the Corpus Christi massacre, in
which a government-trained para-
military group killed student pro-
testers] — which you see in
“Roma.”
There was nothing from out-
side. It was hard to get a record. If
you wanted to listen to bands like
Joy Division or Siouxsie and the
Banshees, you had to go to the
underground markets in down-
town Mexico City or you had to
trade them.
But my life got completely
changed in that time. Everything
was so forbidden that it made it
feel special. There was this real
underground, this creative explo-
sion. You used yourself as a cre-
ative instrument. I wanted to make
a film about those groups of peo-
ple, those artists.The film refers to Francis Alÿs, a
Belgian conceptualist who moved
to Mexico City during the ’80s and
is connected with the city’s art
scene. What other artists inspired
the film?
Ichanged some stuff to make it
more cinematic — I personalized it
— but it was based on things I saw.
There was a Catalonian group
called la Fura dels Baus that was a
very radical group doing terror
theater in Catalonia. They wouldOscar del PozoAFP / Getty ImagesFILMMAKERHari Sama has turned his youth amid Mexico City’s 1980s art and music scene into the movie “This Is Not Berlin.”
The art of discovery
By Carolina A. MirandaTHE SUNDAY CONVERSATION
SUNDAY CALENDAR
HOLDING
COURT
ON THE
TV SET
RUNNING
THE SHOW, E6
A POETIC
AND TIMELY
VIEW OF
A CHANGING
CITY
NEW RELEASES, E8
Please, pleads a charac-
ter we meet in “Eliza,” just let
him talk to a real human.
The interactive game un-
folds as a not-too-distant
nightmare, one in which
technology has enabled us
to talk to everyone and con-
nect with no one. It also taps
our fears over healthcare ac-
cess and how our always
connected life affects our
mental health. It’s a timely
work of digital anxiety that
captures a generational de-
sire to use apps and technol-
ogy to solve problems rather
than seek to fully under-
stand them.
A work of sci-fi that
would likely appeal to fans of
“Black Mirror,” “Eliza” rec-
ognizes that the quest for
personal understanding is
itself a form of play. What
puzzle, after all, remains
harder to crack than the hu-
man mind? “Eliza,” nodding
to the trend of self-help and
on-demand therapy apps,
imagines a world where our
local shrink has been auto-
mated, arguing that an im-
partial computer program
can be just as accurate in
diagnosing depression and
other ailments as a real-life
human. Our digital foot-
print, the game’s tech propo-
nents tell us, will reveal more
secrets than whatever we
say to a certified therapist.
At least that’s the theory.
Plenty, of course, goes
wrong, and “Eliza” becomes
an exploration of mind
games, both in our inability
to read ourselves and in
the misguided belief that a
quick fix is a permanent one.
We play as Evelyn, a once-
prominent tech developer
who disappeared from social
media for about three years.
What inspired her tech and
emotional hiatus is an
underlying mystery. Evelyn
returns to work as a proxy
for Eliza, the digital ther-
apist the game is named af-
ter, and the program she
helped create. In this role,
she reads a script, wearing
augmented reality glasses
that analyze her patients
and feed her lines.
In these scenes, “Eliza”
largely puts the player on
rails, as Evelyn is instructed
not to offer her own insights
— it will confuse Eliza’s read-
ing of the patient. Some cli-
ents know the game; they’re
there to express discontent,
get some anti-depressants
and move on. Others appear
stuck, such as the man who
begs for Evelyn to turn Eliza
off and just talk to him. But
there’s a script for that too.
Here’s where “Eliza” gets
sinister. Its world is so cold
that even a personal touch is
false. Most of Evelyn’s pa-
tients are overwhelmed with
modern life and technolo-
gy’s performative aspects.
They see friends’ social me-
dia timelines as real and
struggle not to become
happy or succeed but to
maintain an illusion.WHAT TO PLAYDigital
‘shrink’
is in.
Beware
By Todd Martens‘ELIZA’explores perils
of technology, our desire
to automate intimacy.Zachtronics