DOC EDGE 16 REVIEW | GABO: THE CREATION OF GABRIEL GARCIA MARQUEZ
With Gabo: the creation of Gabriel García Márquez, director Justin Webster does a masterful job of exploring the personal life and formative moments of one of the most influential authors in Latin America and, indeed, the world.
Gabo contains intimate and humorous conversations with his siblings, close friends, colleagues, and even former President of the United States Bill Clinton. The picture they paint is of a man with Caribbean flair and a penchant for wearing colourful clothes. A man with a wry sense of humour who was unfailingly kind. A man who dreamed of winning the Nobel Prize for literature even in his twenties and realised that ambition in 1982.
In fact, it turns out that Clinton is a massive fan of the Nobel Laureate. If you needed any convincing, Clinton describes 100 Years of Solitude, García Márquez’s most famous novel, as “the greatest novel written in any language since William Faulkner died. It told eternal truths of human nature, human motivation, how we’re driven up and down by love and hate, greed and generosity, hopes and fears.”
The documentary charts the life of García Márquez from the forbidden romance of his parents, his childhood in Aracataca, his career as a journalist and struggling writer, to his death that elicited a collective cry of grief from an entire continent. In particular, it focuses on the experiences, places and people he drew his inspiration from. For example, his superstitious grandmother for whom the extraordinary was as much a part of everyday life as the ordinary, something which influenced his literary style of magical realism.
García Márquez was present for and personally affected by many seminal events in Latin American politics. From the assassination of Colombian Presidential candidate Luis Carlos Galán, to the American embargo on Cuba and the terrorism that the drug lord Pablo Escobar inflicted on Colombia. Although he did not wish to be a politician, it is without doubts that his life was very much intertwined with the politics in Latin America. Gabo even explores the author’s controversial friendship with Cuban leader Fidel Castro, which he used to gain freedom for dozens of imprisoned writers and artists in Cuba.
This documentary will make you want to read this larger than life author’s books immediately. And if you only loved García Márquez for his literary works before, after watching this you will love him for the man he was as well.
First published for Mac+Mae 2016.
