A few months ago I listened at the Bangkok subway a Hotel Jorge Podcast where Javier Aznar spoke with the writer Milena Busquets. During the talk they both reflected that nobody wants to talk about pandemic. It caught my attention and I immediately thought about my friend Daniel Landa, Partner in this VAP project, To relate it to your Atlantic documentary. I called him that same afternoon.
It turns out that Dani recorded part of that series of thirteen chapters traveling throughout the African western coast during the Covid-19 era. Registered empty places, Without people, Where animals, In the absence of man, they had occupied spaces that belonged to them, and where remote tribes felt more threatened by the poverty that condemned the hill for a virus of which they knew nothing.
I participated in the last chapter, Namibia and South Africa, in which I helped with production and made my own reports to The Confidential Spanish and Estonian Postman. I remember that we interviewed some Himbas in the Epupa cataracts. A good part of that indigenous population had abandoned their villages and had moved to the margins of the Kunene flow. An atrocious drought that lasted more than three years had caused most of the cattle to die of thirst. The Himbas burned the rotten bodies of thousands of cows and went to live by the river, In search of water.
The situation was already catastrophic, But then the pandemic arrived and a misery bomb exploded in those desert lands. I asked the leader of the indigenous group for the pandemic. I felt curiosity to know if they, Foranos of the global village, They knew something about a disease that had paralyzed the globe.
Pandemia arrived and a misery bomb exploded in those desert lands
-“We have heard something about a disease that spreads and kills people. Some people came to explain to us. That is why tourists no longer come to visit this place and that has made us even more impoverished.. We need people to come", I said.
-Do you know someone who has gotten sick from the coronavirus??
-“No, No one here has had that disease”, He answered me, And he was thoughtful, And immediately asked me: "Where does you come from is the disease?
-“Yes. I come from Italy, a far country, and many people have died there”, I replied.
-And when our interpreter translated the answer all exclaimed an "AAAAHH" and the oldest replied: "Well, then you may bring the disease here".
The scene summarized a bit the complexity of the problem. The Himbas needed tourists to survive, But they didn't want a virus that could get sick. The same dead end in which all countries fell affected semi-nomadic peoples completely away from civilization.
And all that was recorded by Daniel Landa and Vensen Modino, The camera, In a document that has some historical. But, Of all the documentaries that Landa has directed -"the trip of the three oceans"; "A separate world"; "Pacific" and "Atlantic"- This is the one that has had the most problems in distribution. The rest have been issued in more than 130 countries and bought by the most prestigious chains, But this one that portrays an adventure, uppercase, unique, has had a slower initial market (It grows).
Why does that happen? Because, I, People don't want to know anything about covid, nor see empty spaces without them, nor see masks on the face, nor remember old vices, nor receive sermons about their habits, in part. And because now television prefers to broadcast True Crime, where they make a cheap three -chapter production on a corpse that appeared in a cube.
“Your documentary is likely to be highly valued and it will be preserved as a social chronicle of great value within a few decades, When Covid is history and on TV they put documentaries like those we see today of the catastrophes of the twentieth century ”, I told Dani. Is there any other document in the world that can teach a route along the West African coast with empty cities, Wild fields without humans, impoverished people and tribes that feared more for oblivion than the sneezing?
Perhaps Atlantic images are one day from a museum that explains that there was a first time where everyone enclosed himself at the same time in their homes
Perhaps Atlantic images are one day from a museum that explains that there was a first time where everyone enclosed himself at the same time in their homes. But today that people don't want to remember. Memory is a sheet and paint workshop.
The Covid seemed that it would bring a apocalypse that some would believe it would be infinite. There was a lot of talk about the amount of series, books and movies that would be of the pandemic. Do you remember any? Nothing of that has happened. Some series dared to name it, But there are hardly any works that deal with the subject and those that are waiting for them not to hurt. Isn't it absurd?
Nothing will change
I covered the pandemic as a journalist in Italy. Which meant to be on the first line of the front of a global war. China did not offer any truthful information about what was happening and the first outbreak of which what happened was related was in the place that I was. Everything was confusing. We portray a disease to which few at first gave importance, Of course I did not give it, And suddenly it became a tsunami. Rome without tourists was a spectrum. As a journalist I could go out, So I walked through its empty streets and contemplated its most famous monuments in complete solitude.
I remember that I interviewed a tramp, Massimiliano, A Sardinian in Rome. I did it twice. The first was the 13 March 2020, two days after confinement decree. I walked through a ghostic, Without literature, Eternal city. I became the only living being of two legs contemplated by the Trevi Fontana, The dome of the pantheon or the staircase of the Plaza de España. Being able to live that in the mega tourist Roma was a priori a dream. It was a nightmare. I listened to my steps thunder between the cobblestones. The streets were absolutely empty. The center of Rome was a corpse.
I was looking without a roof. Where had those who had any place to protect themselves be protected? They did. They stayed at home, the street, And for a few weeks they own a city in which they are normally a hindrance, A regret that sounds like a bark. I interviewed several, But Massimiliano was a different voice. “They are afraid that if they are infected they will lose other things. Many people get the benefit of the pain of others ", He told me about the total abandonment in which they had left them while everyone ran to lock themselves in their homes.
They are afraid that if they are infected they will lose other things. Many people get benefit from the pain of others
The conversation seemed very interesting and I kept the feeling that Massimiliano had something else to tell. His thought was very structured, But it came from a distant place full of recesses. I proposed to El Confidencial to make a piece. Then, The media published interviews with important virologists, sanitary, political, sociologists… Who was going to want to give an interview with a roof? The confidential wanted.
The second interview was long. The world dissected me from the sink that was his life. He released a trail of ideas, thoughts and complaints without reproaches about that historical moment we lived. All locked in their homes; He lying with cardboard next to the fence of a store sales store closed to lime and song. "The coronavirus has hit everyone. Everyone knows what this drama is, But at the same time there have been no change in people. Maybe someone sees it sideways but when this ends, or when he returns home and everything goes well, This thought happens”.
And he was right, It passed, passes, all. The Covid, poverty, of which I will write shortly, disease, violence ... we pass in front of her. The traveler makes her fetish, The inhabitant suffers it. It happens, And we don't want to talk about that, And we don't learn anything. We forget it to redeem us.
