29/10/2024 - Martín Rejtman follows the daily life of a group of Venezuelan food delivery riders in Buenos Aires but fails to deliver a precise narrative

More than 20 percent of the population of Venezuela has emigrated in the last few decades. 220,000 of them went to Argentina, informs us the insert at the beginning of Martín Rejtman’s Riders [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which screened at this year’s Intersección - International Film Festival A Coruña after its world-premiere and its Special Jury Award win in Visions du Réel’s Burning Lights section. One may assume that this is a Venezuelan diaspora movie, but then, the camera circles in on the food delivery riders swarming through the city of Buenos Aires, their green, blue, and orange insulated pockets having the air of an artistic lesson in Pointillism.

The year is 2020, COVID is on the rise, and online ordering is in high demand. These riders, one must assume, are Venezuelan. After all, to the untrained ear, the local and foreign Spanish accents are indistinguishable. Why have they left Venezuela to deliver food in Buenos Aires? It is unclear. Known for his previous fiction work including deadpan humour-infused titles such as Silvia Prieto (1999) and The Practice [+see also:
film review
trailer
interview: Martín Rejtman
film profile], Rejtman neither dives into the genesis of the Venezuelan exodus, which one assumes is due to the consequences of Nicolás Maduro’s regime, nor does he turn his protagonists into fully fleshed-out three-dimensional beings.

We see them struggle with broken bikes, having to substitute them with not-exactly cheap rental city bikes for the time being, or wondering why they are sent several blocks on foot for a delivery. “Don’t accept it,” one other rider recommends. After all, time is money, and they don’t exactly make a lot. Nevertheless, at this point, one has to ask who the movie was made for. Its strong rootedness in just letting the pictures talk does leave out a non-Hispanic audience, who might not pick up on all the social and cultural cues.

At times, Riders seems like a film about the sheer mass delivery mechanisation during the pandemic, in which restaurants and malls formed a true Fordian, 21st-century moving assembly line dealing in hot meals. The camera stays afar, observing this Sisyphean task of picking up orders, delivering them, rinse and repeat. It takes some time before we circle in on Joel, one of the Venezuelan riders. But even when we follow him to his flat, shared with fellow riders, he stays a stranger, a foil to create some protagonist identification for viewers.

The whole diaspora aspect disappears in the second act when Rejtman moves the story to Caracas, Venezuela, in 2022. He follows those who stayed, at least for now. Conditions at the local colleges are dire, the students are assembling to protest. Even here, in a country shaken by a food shortage only a few years ago, food deliveries are in high demand. Once again we see the colourful bags and riders speeding through the city, intercut with the daily life of relatives of the Venezuelan riders in Argentina.

As he offers prolonged montages passing by housing blocks, of kids in karate classes and at school, one does have to wonder if Rejtman started running out of footage at some point. There is nothing wrong with the distanced observational narrative – after all, cinema verité used to be the gold standard. But keeping his narrative arc obscure and his characters so much at bay often makes for a disjointed experience.

As his gaze returns to Buenos Aires, overly cheerful phone calls home by the expatriates about the experience abroad contradict everything we just have seen. One can sense the strong pulse of a promising narrative trying to emerge, but by then, the movie is pretty much over.

Riders is a co-production between Un Puma from Argentina, TerraTreme Filmes from Portugal, and Pandora Filmproduktion from Germany.