What does Bill Clinton think about Gabriel García Márquez? In the unlikely case that this has been a pressing question in your life, we have some very good news for you: Barcelona-based American filmmaker Justin Webster has made a biographical documentary about the life of Gabo, and it features an interview with none other than President William Jefferson Clinton.
Admittedly for many, Bubba may not seem like a logical first (or third, or fourth) choice for a documentary on the life of a Nobel Prize-winning Colombian novelist, but by the looks of the trailer, Old Bill’s actually got some pretty insightful things to say about the author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. But the all-star list of interviewees doesn’t stop there. Webster has amassed an impressive collection of voices for his investigation into the life of the man behind the Nobel Prize-winning myth. Indeed, along with a handful of Colombian and American writers, Gabo: The Creation of Gabriel García Márquez also features close collaborators like literary agent Carmen Balcells, and even Colombian ex-president César Gaviria to round things out.
It seems that what most fascinated Webster was how a boy from an insignificant provincial town in Colombia could eventually reach the hearts of millions of readers across the world. So the director even took his shoot back to Gabo’s hometown of Aracataca, near the Caribbean coast, to talk to some of Gabo’s fellow cataqueros about the writer’s legacy. From there, Webster hits the road to some of the man’s old haunts in Cuba, France, Spain, and of course, Mexico City, where Mr. García Márquez tragically passed away early last year.
Gabo’s trailer strikes an elegiac tone, with an inspirational, new-agey piano track accompanying a series of highly reverential interviews that cast the writer as a sort of, well, “superior being,” to quote one interview. Mixed in with the interviews, we find news footage from the day of his passing, along with archival material from Gabo’s professional and personal life. It’s all rather uplifting and emotional, and certainly gives us a few reasons to catch the film. Unfortunately, we currently have no specific date for its stateside release. Stay tuned for more details.