“Leche”/”Mala Leche”
Children gather in the doorway of a modest farmhouse, smiling. Dressed in his best, a ranchero flaunts his rope tricks. Hands press the liquid out of cheese; a tortilla iron flattens a ball of dough. To the sounds of milk jetting into a pail, a calf nurses, a woman embroiders, two crickets mate in a patch of arid scrub. This is Aguascalientes, Mexico, through the lens of “Leche,” Naomi Uman’s beautifully handmade 1998 documentary about a farm family’s daily lives and work. Neither the film nor its 2003 counterpoint, “Mala Leche,” tell a conventional story. Each is constructed like a poem of images, intertitles, and voiceovers. “Leche” comprises static extreme close-ups of single objects (toes pressing into the footbed of a sandal, a snarl of cactus prickles) and processes (the branding of calves). The film itself is spotted and scratched; the press notes claim the stock was developed on location in buckets. It’s like watching a family album made animate — little glimpses reveal the family’s hardscrabble but loving life. “Mala Leche” is a different animal, shot in color in the immigrant enclave of Pixley, Calif., where families work 12-hour shifts at industrial dairy farms. Watching the two films together multiplies their effect. The kind husbandry of “Leche” contrasts with the sad but seemingly inevitable conditions in the dairies, where cattle are packed into a stockyard and newborn calves are trained to drink from buckets. The subjects of “Mala Leche” are members of the same family. Ostensibly seeking a better life, they’ve instead found alcoholism and modern “conveniences” bought at outrageous prices on credit. Yet Uman’s camera is again rapt by curious images and mesmerizing sounds — little girls dancing to Shakira, the droning of a milking machine, puddles of milky-white waste bubbling in a field.
“Leche” and “Mala Leche” screen on Friday, Sept. 19, 6pm, at the Hideout.
This article appears in September 12 • 2003.