King of Kings

Most of the Colombian entries into the Miami Film Festival this March dealt with the usual subject topics associated with the embattled country: drug barons, urban violence, rural poverty. Yet documentarian Alan Tomlinson, who has seen these realities in the flesh as a print and radio journalist, brought a change of tune. “I have been working the negative Colombia for a long time,” he told a post-screening crowd at the film festival. “The word cocaine is not mentioned in The Accordion Kings.”

Tomlinson won an Emmy first time out in 1995 with a film about an Ebola epidemic, and has gone on to document human rights violations, hurricanes, and massacres. But his latesta movie about vallenato, the up-tempo but gentle ballads of rural Colombia is, in his words, “the film that has given me the most satisfaction.”

Tomlinson covered the Colombian drug wars for  BBC radio, as well as the first Gulf War and the American intervention in Somalia. In 1995 Tomlinson became part of a visionary 1995 experiment by The New York Times to put cameras in the hands of reporters. “When you’re in radio, you’re painting pictures with sounds,” he says, sitting in his Miami living room in a brief moment at home between location shoots all over Latin America. Adding a camera seemed like a natural move. The Times project did not take off, but Tomlinson, with an Emmy under his belt, was hooked on filmmaking.

With camera in hand, Tomlinson brought at least two epoch-making incidents in Mexico to life in video. One was Massacre in Tlatelolco (2008), about the 1969 demonstration that was violently suppressed by the government and radicalized a whole generation of Mexicans. The other was The Colosio Case (2009), on the 1994 assassination of Luis Donaldo Colosio, a presidential candidate destined for victory who became openly critical of his dominant party. His murder, like the Tlatelolco affair, devastated the Mexican electorate’s confidence in the political establishment.

Although these and other projects kept Tomlinson in the same gritty world of hard journalism, he was primed for the music film. In the ‘70s, he spent about three years hanging out in bullfighter’s bars in Southern Spain, listening to flamenco. The English-born filmmaker, has also been enamored with Irish folk music since he was a youth. “The Irish treat me like an honorary Irishman because I know all the Irish ballads by heart,” he says.

Though he did not film in Colombia until The Accordion Kings in 2007, his reporting assignments there exposed him to vallenato, the folk music of a region on the Magdalena River where Gabriel García Márquez sets his magical narratives. The Nobel Prize winner was born not far from Valledupar, where the King of Kings accordion competition the film chronicles takes place.

Vallenato has long enjoyed a vast popularity in Colombia, thanks to its simple yet poetic storytelling, which narrates magical duels between accordionists, the power of female beauty and historic parranadas (days-long parties). The genre has come to its international zenith because of Grammy winner Carlos Vives’ internationally acclaimed renditions of traditional songs like La gota fría (The Cold Sweat). In the liner notes of ¡Ayombe!, a vallenato compilation on the Smithsonian’s Folkways label, Vives writes that vallenato “has best portrayed the true way of being and feeling of the Colombian people.”

The Accordion Kings, for the most part, follows Tomlinson’s wishes that “the music and the musicians speak for themselves.” Storied composers explain how they came up with beloved songs. Accordionists recall when they first picked up the instrument. They perform on camera—including multiple songs by Vives—displaying a dazzling virtuosity on the three instruments that compose a traditional ensemble: a push-button accordion; a scratch instrument made from a ridged bamboo branch known as the guacharaca; and a caja, or single hand drum. As Vives explains, the accordion is European, the guacharaca Indian, and the caja African—making vallenato a perfect fusion of the three major influences feeding mainstream culture in the Americas.

While most of Tomlinson’s works deal with harsh realities outside the United States, Made in Miami (2007) chronicles the rise and transformation of an American classic: Muhammad Ali. It’s a documentary biography of the great boxer that focuses on his time in Miami, where he trained for major fights and where he evolved as a boxer, a person and a political icon.

Thanks to some revealing footage discovered by Francesca de Onís, Tomlinson’s wife and researcher, viewers can see that what looked like wild braggadocio was actually the fighter’s wily use of the media to fashion a public image for himself and intimidate his opponent. Every move was calculated. Later, as Cassius Clay becomes Ali, the champion sheds his buffoonish persona and enters a new phase of serious religious, racial and political commitment. No hagiography, the documentary reveals Ali’s tragic missteps as he distances himself from Malcolm X, perhaps contributing indirectly to Malcolm’s death.

Tomlinson is back to the dark side of journalism with his current project, a four-part crime series for Discovery Latin America and Discovery en Español, shot in Rio de Janeiro, Medellín, Ciudad Juárez and border towns in Texas and California. But music still calls to him. He would like to continue making films on other Latin roots genres, like Dominican bachata. He also dreams of a documentary on flamenco that would take him back to those carefree days spent in Spanish bullfighters’ bars. As with The Accordion Kings, Tomlinson’s goal would be to “take the audience on a magic carpet ride.”

Read Enrique Fernadez’s blog at: www.poder360.com/blogs/coordinates