Review by Dennis Marcus
UK certification E | UK RRP £15.99 | DVD Region 2 | Runtime 85 minutes | Directed by Juan Carlos Rulfo
This award-winning documentary is quite a film. Some might argue that it is not a documentary maker’s purpose to be an activist for those that he films, but rather to hold a magnifying glass over the subject that they are studying. Juan Carlos Rulfo’s film quite unashamedly gives its voice to the people who star in this film: the construction workers who are building a 17-kilometre second deck for Mexico City’s inner Periferico freeway.
In The Pit is filmed several years after Mexico City’s administrators signed off the building to build a series of overpasses across the city. This so-called ‘second deck’ almost doubles the city’s road capacity in some areas, which was seen as vital component of infrastructure investment that could really help support future growth.
That’s the context in which the film is set - a context of infrastructure works of which we have all probably at some experienced the ‘user’ side. Very rarely however do we get the perspective of the people doing the building, which is one of the dimensions that I thought made this film so interesting. It presented another aspect of life that many of us probably never consider in any great detail. The fact that it takes place in the maelstrom of activity, colour and noise that is Mexico City makes this film all the more engaging.
While the progress of the building essentially provides the structure of the film, its substance is in the snapshots you gain of the worker’s lives, from funerals to little interviews about their aspirations (shockingly - to make more money!). I think if you took these individually - none of them would be particularly fascinating. But set into a film together with shots that communicate the sheer grandiose scale of the building works, it does make you realise that the people responsible for such works are hundreds of thousands just like us. People with similar life situations, with joy, with frustrations, with complaints about work: simply put - just ordinary people.
That’s what made this beautifully constructed fly-on-the-wall film so compelling - the sheer tenacity of ordinary people toiling with back-breaking work to render something that changes the face of the city. Is it the most spectacular documentary ever made? Probably not. Are the individual characters the most compelling and interesting you’ve ever met? Probably not. But is it a compelling and seemingly honest watch? Absolutely.
EXTRAS ★★ There is a special feature on the DVD that is a 40 minute ‘making of’ that I thought was a bit of a waste of time. It is essentially an unnecessary extended add-on of the main documentary, with additional material from the production crew. For me, it added very little to the experience of the film, which was a bit sad.