Sebastián Miló | Camionero (Truck Driver) / 2012

the model school

by Douglas Messerli

 

Sebastián Miló (screenwriter, inspired by the story “A la vencida va la tercera” by Yomar González, and director) Camionero (Truck Driver) / 2012 [29 minutes]

 

In the 1970s, so the movie explains, the Cubans set up boarding schools wherein students spent half they days in classes and the other half working the fields nearby. Like any such institution, the rules for the students were strict, but bullies could always find the way to gather a gang about them and torture the weaker.

     In this case the bully is Yerandy (Reinier Díaz) who has gathered around him a group of mean boys and girls who literary go out of the way daily to torture the weakling of school, Randy (Antonio Alonso Ramírez) in every way possible, from nightly near-rapes, where Yerandy pisses into Randy’s mouth and the boys gather and spit into the sleeping boy’s face, to raids on his locker, from where they steal the foodstuffs his poor mother has brought him. No matter what he’s doing, they are there to shove and slap him, and lob objects and food in his director. There is hardly a mean trick they miss. And when the teachers do observe something amiss, they are sure to also blame Randy.

     Yet this out-of-control school wins an award for being a model institution, one to be imitated throughout the country.

     Observing all this Raidel (Héctor Medina), who at first remains quiet about what he sees; after all, any who even speaks to Randy, nicked the “camel” because of thinness, is labeled a fag and opens themselves up to equal torture by Yerandy and his gang. Raidel, however, begins speaking to and standing up for Randy, at first without incident.

      But when they finally come for him, something he has been praying they won’t do, he is ready. As he says in his role as narrator throughout the film, he is not afraid of them but of the consequences. For when they do come, he takes out a knife he has been sharpening throughout the film and stabs Yerandy and others to death, one by one.

     If they question him, he realizes that there can be no right answers since no one to verify what he has seen, and Randy himself, as he admits, has long ago died inside. Randy has expressed his desire to become a truck driver in order to move away from all such beings he has encountered through his life.

      But now Raidel is taken off from all the other adolescent torturers to be imprisoned in what he surely realizes, as he breaks down in tears, will be a far more horrendous world of where the strong torture the weak endlessly until they break.

      Cuban director Sebastián Miló has created a raw and revealing movie about the effects of bullying and homophobia, although the latter is downplayed in this work, and there is no obvious evidence of Randy’s being gay, except perhaps for his deep love and dependence upon his mother.

 

Los Angeles, December 19, 2024

Reprinted from My Queer Cinema blog (December 2024).