Panamanian Director, Abner Benaim, returns to IDFA with his latest work: “Invasion,” reconstructing the US invasion of Panama in 1989 to depose dictator Manuel Noriega, through the recollections of ordinary citizens as well as the former leader.
“As the 25th anniversary of the invasion approached, I started talking to people about what had happened and realized that there was still this urgency to talk, even though so many years had passed,” explains Benaim, who was previously at the festival with Maids & Bosses.
“There’s no one official version of what happened – everyone has a different opinion on what took place. I didn’t want to take to the streets and try to shoot a historical reconstruction – there’s no trace in any case of what happened, apart from a small memorial. You have to go inside people’s minds… it’s all in the memories of the people.” Benaim and his team initially vetted the stories of 1,000 individuals in the development stage, garnered through an open-call put out via media and social networks.
He whittled this group down to 200 interviews, some 50 of which appear in the film.
The reconstruction of the invasion is as much in the detail of the rock music the US troops blared out across the city and the fact that one woman’s contractions synced with the booms of the bombs as the factual accounts of what actually happened.
There is no archive footage, just the eyewitness accounts.
Benaim says that Noriega, who is now serving a 20-year jail sentence in Panama, agreed to participate because he liked the film’s approach.
“He liked the idea that it was multi-voice and that all of the voices were going to be heard. Of course he has his story, but that’s not all in the film because that would be another film,” Benaim says.
In fact, on the back of the interview for Invasion, Benaim is now in negotiations with Noriega to make another documentary focusing only on the former general’s story
“I’d think it would be interesting to make a film like Errol Morris’ McNamara film,” says Benaim, referring to the US filmmaker’s 2003 picture The Fog of War: Eleven Lessons from the Life of Robert S. McNamara in which the former US Secretary of Defence talks about modern warfare.
“Just let him talk and let people decide whether they believe him or not – rather than an investigation type of film. I already have about three hours of him talking, only audio but it’s interesting research,” adds Benaim, who also produces under the Apertura Films banner.
The Panamanian response to the documentary has been phenomenal.
Some 50,000 people – a record for a documentary in Panama – saw the film when it was released there this autumn, and the film provoked a media storm and fierce local debate.
In another first for a Panamanian film, including fiction works, Invasion has been put forward as Panama’s first-ever best foreign-language submission this year.
Benaim is now trying to raise backing to create an interactive, digital platform giving access to all the accounts and also enabling other Panamanians to download their invasion stories too.