Dammed Ecologies, ‘Hydro-irrealism’, and Aesthetic Slowness in Betzabé García’s "Los reyes del pueblo que no existe" (2015)

Abstract

This article discusses Betzabé García’s Los reyes del pueblo que no existe (Kings of Nowhere, 2015), a Mexican documentary that tackles the community-scale experiences of socio-ecological degradation, land clearings and mass displacement produced by the damming of a regional river for hydro-development. Although the documentary primarily adheres to the defining realist gestures and formal austerity of observational and ‘slow cinema’ idioms to capture everyday life in a flood-stricken rural landscape, as this article explores, the use of a surreal and spectral visual grammar in certain sequences seems to mediate the radical estrangement that saturates social reality in the zones of sacrifice and submergence wrought by extractive capital. Building on Warwick Reseach Collective’s world-ecological examination of how ‘irrealist aesthetics’ correspond to the experience of extreme and abrupt restructuring of socio-ecological relations engendered by capitalism’s extractive operations, this article suggests that the unearthly and ghostly atmosphere conveyed through the film’s enigmatic mise-en-scène attends to the unfathomable changes to agrarian realities produced by the infrastructures of hydro-extraction, as well as to the brutal dynamics of dispossession and plunder that underpin them. Thus, reading García’s documentary as a work that evinces what Sharae Deckard calls the ‘aesthetics of hydro-irrealism’, this article argues that the film fosters a critical view of the bewildering yet not immediately perceptible extractive and terror-inflicting mechanisms that structure the region’s socio-ecological rupture, attuning viewers not only to the protracted and concealed injustices fostered by hydro-infrastructural development, but also to the oft-invisibilised forms in which local communities respond to the world-destroying schemes of neoliberal extractivism.