Even the Rain

Even the Rain is a powerful and moving film that is essentially a study of colonialism in Latin America but that is also an engrossing, multi-layered story featuring believable characters facing real human dilemmas.

Idealistic Spanish film director Sebastian (Gael García Bernal) and his cynical producer Costa (Luis Tosar) are making an epic about the conquest of Latin America. They're making it in Bolivia because that's where they can do it cheapest. Things become complicated when Daniel (Carlos Aduviri), a local cast as a 16th century native in the film within a film, turns out to be one of the leaders of his community’s protests against water privatisation.

The film explores colonialism in three scenarios - the original colonialism of Columbus and his men, the colonialism of the multinational companies taking over the Bolivian water supplies and the colonialism implicit in a Spanish film crew telling the history of Latin America (and using the wrong country as the setting).

This could all be too heavy and well meaning, but instead it is engaging and compelling, largely because the politics come from believable situations and the characters reactions are entirely believable for people in their situations.

You can find out more about the global water crisis on the Water.org website.

As ever, text in red contains hyperlinks that take you to other websites where you can find out more.