Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel Garcia Marquez - a portrait of the Noble Prize winning author, drew crowds in the ongoing Bengaluru International Film Festival. Despite being the last show of the day, the biopic drew crowds because Marquez is widely admired here and many of his works have been translated to Kannada. His novels have also been adapted to theatre. His iconic novels, One Hundred Years of Solitude, Chronicle of Death Foretold and Love in the time of Cholera have been translated to Kannada.
As he is one of the most read Latin American writer in Karnataka, many litterateurs, cine and theatre personalities were curious about the documentary. The biopic, directed by Barcelona-based film maker Justin Webster and shot extensively in Columbia, Cuba, France, Mexico, and Spain, provides an answer to the question — How did a boy from a tiny town become a writer who won hearts of millions?
In this interview-based biopic, Columbian writers including Maria Jimena Duzan, Juan Gabrial Vasquez, Marquez biographer Gerald Martin, Martin, writer’s literary agent Carmen Balcells, provides insight into the life of Marquez.
Gabo focuses more on the political life of Marquez rather than that of his personal and literary career. Journalist Juan Gabriel Vasquez and biographer Gerald Martin trace the writer’s journey from the Columbian village of Aracataca to becoming an internationally-renowned author.
The filmmaker explores Marquez’s childhood days with his grandparents and draws experiences from his death-obsessed grandfather and superstitious grandmother. After his grandfather’s death Marquez moves to Bogota to make his way in the world of letters, where he establishes himself as a journalist. Webster follows Marquez’s path to fame, his shock over Pablo Escobar’s reign of terror and fascination for Fidel Castro through interviews and archival footage, opinions of friends and journalists. Some of the interviewees spoke of Marquez’ childhood influences.
Marquez fans feel the film doesn’t dwell on the magical realism that illuminated his works. It dwells more on the novels No One Writes to the Colonel, Love in the time of Cholera and One Hundred Years of Solitude .
The biopic, has the narrative tension of an exploration and succeeds in transforming available material into engaging tale.
