Un Secreto en la Caja (2016) User Reviews

The Imaginary Line

[davo · 7/10 · 26 August 2020]

I have reasons both personal and professional for being interested in this film. The ostensible subject of the film is Marcelo Chiriboga (1933-1990), an internationally known Ecuadorian writer, member of the Latin American "boom" generation. I come from an Ecuadorian American family (both parents and 2 of my 5 siblings were born there.) The library where I work received a copy of this film and I had the pleasure of creating a bibliographic record for it. Naturally I'm interested in the biographical details of its subject, and therein lies my inability to write about it without resorting to SPOILERS. (You have been warned.) Chiriboga is a fictional character created by José Donoso y Carlos Fuentes and referred to by other authors, but nowhere else is he as exhaustively documented as in this film. Without the resources of films like Zelig or Forest Gump, Chiriboga is inserted in history by splicing him into photos with other Latin American boom writers, and by interviews with people who knew him. There is only one surviving piece of film of him, an interview from Spanish television with the real journalist Joaquín Soler Serrano. Like some other writers of the boom, Chiriboga suffered the the trials of exile. I am also reminded of Dean Reed, a minor U.S. star who found greater success in Latin America where his consciousness was raised to revolutionary fervor. Like Chiriboga, he ended up in East Germany, married to an actress. (Dean Reed had a fairly extensive film career and I also had the pleasure cataloging a documentary about him entitled Gringo Rojo. He was sometimes referred to as the "Red Elvis.") Back to Un Secreto en la Caja. For the (bibliographic) record, "mockumentary" is not a prescribed genre term I could use, so I was kind of glad to use "documentary style film", which describes it pretty well. It does not have the broad humor of something like This Is Spinal Tap, but its humor is more subtle and underplayed. For instance, in this universe, Chiriboga invents Donoso, instead of the other way around. The Imaginary Line is the title of Chiriboga's masterwork. We even see a bit of the terrible film adaptation of the book. It is about the 1941 border war between Ecuador and Peru. The imaginary line may refer to one which gave Ecuador its name, or it may refer to its border with Peru. Through the Protocol of Rio in 1942, Ecuador ceded the southeastern region of its territory to Peru, but it continued to appear on maps as a disputed area. The wars with Peru frame the narrative of Chiriboga's biography. After 20 years, he returns to Ecuador in 1980. In 1981, there follows another war with Peru. The author dies in 1990. The third and final border war of the 20th century between these two countries occurred in 1995. Perhaps the secret in the box is the ultimate fate of Ecuador.

A way too secret film

[mateogiov · 10/10 · 2 February 2020]

"A Secret in the Box" is an intelligently made and dynamically edited film that explores and subtly critiques a unique Latin-American period (the Peruvian/Ecuadorian wars). It does so creatively and leaves us with a surprising, charming and delightful mocumentary that is all to underrated.