Image source, Courtesy Andrés Ruiz
Colombia is the most unequal country in Latin America and one of the most unequal in the world, according to the World Bank's Gini index.
It is also known, thanks to a study by the OECD (Organization for Economic Cooperation and Development), that in that country it takes 11 generations for a child to escape poverty, among other reasons because access to education is not guaranteed and there is a very large gap between urban and rural provision.
With this panorama, how do Colombian families experience the conditioning of the social class to which they belong and how does their social mobility occur?
These are some of the questions addressed by the documentary "The Game of Life", directed by Andrés Ruiz, which in addition to being a success at the national box office, has just received two Macondo awards: best documentary and best film chosen by the public.
The film project arose within the framework of research by the Universidad de los Andes that followed, at three-year intervals, 10,000 families to try to understand "why getting out of poverty continues to be exceptional in Colombia."
The result is a large longitudinal survey, whose data became part of the National Administrative Department of Statistics of Colombia.
Ruiz and his team recorded several of these rural and urban families for 14 years.
They recorded how they multiplied as the children grew, how parents became grandparents, and how everyone's destiny was shaped in the midst of diverse and adverse circumstances.
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It was a long creation process that also ended up revealing the life story of the director, since until the moment of editing the documentary he had never told his colleagues or friends that he himself is a strange case of social mobility.
Image source, BBC World
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Andrés Ruiz grew up in a family of seven children that fell into extreme poverty, faced the precariousness of rural education and the classism of higher education, and was the first in the family to manage to enter university, even without having the means to pay tuition.
BBC Mundo spoke with him in Miami, in the middle of the project's international tour, about his story, the process of telling it and about how the documentary puts a face to the data that reflects Colombian inequality.
This is an edited version of the conversation for length and clarity.
It was thanks to the film that you spoke for the first time about your family's poverty. Do you remember when and why you started hiding your origin?
We always lived in very poor neighborhoods and I used to be the "gomelo" in that environment, but when I was in eighth grade, I was about 15 years old, they transferred me to a military school where I became the poor one in school.
One day they took us for a run in the mountains and my classmates began to say: "oh, very poor people live here, pure peasants" and they made fun, then the teacher said: "control yourselves, guys, there are classmates of yours who live in this area."
Everyone began to look at each other and pointed to a fellow farmer and he said: "It's not me, it's Andrés because they know him around here."
I just said "what's the problem?" and we continued walking until we reached my house, which was very, very humble, prefabricated, but next to it there was a casaquinta (hacienda), so someone said that I should live in that casaquinta and I simply smiled, I didn't say anything, but I stuck to that version with my attitude.
Some time later we had to jog further up the mountain and the teacher told me: "Ruiz, since you live nearby, don't come to school, wait for us there."
When I got up and saw all my classmates standing there, in front of my house, I thought they were going to realize where I lived, so I went out from behind and went down to where they were on the side of the house.
That was the first time I lied clearly, consciously. I didn't want to tell what my house was so as not to face the bullying of being, perhaps, the poorest in school.
I felt ashamed, I just wanted us to leave that area quickly and I felt uneasy, I felt super bad, I didn't know how to handle that situation. It was an internal conflict.
And is this how your strategy begins, let's say, of camouflaging yourself to be able to enter other social circles?
Yes, because I started to realize that you just drop some information and that's enough, there's no need to blatantly lie.
I, for example, had a great privilege that allowed this to happen and that is that, despite the poverty in which I lived, my father, being a truck driver, traveled around the country and sometimes took us with him.
We had to take turns of two, hidden among the load. He put a kind of mattress on top of the potato packages so we could go out for a walk.
Then I was able to go to the beach, I had photos in the sea, and that was not common in my circle. I was a boy who sometimes literally didn't have anything to eat, but I had gone to Cartagena during the June holidays, so I was talking about that trip.
Or at lunchtime I would go play soccer and say I wasn't hungry, that's how I handled situations, because I never wanted to accept that I didn't have or was missing something.
You have said publicly that when the producer proposed including your story in the documentary, you did not want to do it. What made you change your mind?
When we were in the process of editing the documentary and I started talking about my story, a teacher asked me what my concern was with telling it. I told her that I didn't want to expose myself to condescension and that I was afraid of losing what I had achieved.
Then she told me about another investigation at the university about low-income young people who had managed to enter through a government-subsidized program for outstanding high school graduates.
And he told me that those kids had stories similar to mine, that most of them had hidden their origins.
He told me: "What you have is impostor syndrome. Your story is wonderful, you should feel proud and not be worried," and he suggested I talk to the project researcher and the boys.
We did a session with them in which they told anecdotes and there I began to be aware that I had done certain things, just like them, and that I was not aware of them.
Like when a student said: "Once I took the wrong bus because everyone said "let's go to 82, where do you live?" Let's go?" and he said "yes, I live there too." That's when I realized that I had done the same thing and I felt ridiculous.
I remember arriving at the place and saying "I live up there, bye" and then having to turn back.
When the student told it it made me laugh, I was able to add humor to that situation and begin to heal. The most curious thing is that I later told the anecdote at a film event to which I was invited and another panelist, a film critic, said: "I did the same thing."
I understood that it was not just my problem, that it was a problem of society and that is why it was valuable to include it in the film.
And what was the process of understanding and telling that phenomenon? What happened next?
The same teacher, Tatiana Andia, played a very important role because she got me to have conversations beyond her.
I discovered sociology books, I read Pierre Bourdieu and Göran Therborn, author of the book "Inequality kills", and I could see that it is a phenomenon that does not only happen in Colombia, nor in a single type of human relationship.
All of this helped me in the process of healing my own pain. I realized that I had a wound and that uncovering it felt good, so I began to tell my story without shame and in more places.
And I found it very nice that many people from high stratum, from the elites, have sought me out to tell me that they have a similar story.
Recently, in fact, someone told me that it made him think about the history of his family, his father, and that he reflected on how in the United States, for example, people are very proud to say that they come from peasant origins, but not in Colombia.
Let's talk about what you saw in those years of recording about the situation of the peasantry in Colombia...
It's something that always shocked me. For me, if you are in the countryside with so much prosperity, so much food that is what is needed, then you should not be poor.
I always wondered about it and it's something that broke me inside.
The documentary shows, for example, in Montería, in the Sinú area, and in Simijaca, that when you arrive you see corn crops, livestock, a great prosperity of nature and suddenly a super-poor house next door.
One wonders what is happening. I believe that in Colombia we have very isolated and exploited farmers.
Salaries don't make sense, how are they going to pay someone 400,000 thousand pesos a month (USD$120), which is what the ladies told us.
And that, of course, has to do with education, which is essential in rural areas and which I believe can change the world.
That is why at the end of the documentary we include a story that shows how a farmer was trained and then generated prosperity in his region, I think it is something that should happen more.
And after following families for so long, what was your main discovery or learning?
The way poverty traps operate, which is something researchers already knew.
I understood the theory they were talking about, but when you start seeing it in life, not in writing, it changes everything. Seeing how people fall into the same traps is brutal.
You know in theory that education is key, but then you see the impact on the lives that actually have access to it.
Or one understands that teenage pregnancy is complex, but when you start to see that the girls you are filming fall one by one into teenage pregnancy and how that determines them, it is tremendous, very painful.
It was a very revealing process. It allowed me to understand that there are very large structures, beyond personal decisions, that end up being decisive in the process of trying to escape poverty.
The State, culture, family, can perpetuate inequality.
Also understanding that I had had several cheating helped me to be proud of myself and my dad, especially.
That was a brutal discovery because I saw how my father had all the traps: his mother abandoned him, which is not common, his father died, he did not have access to education, he had seven children with a teenage mother because my mother had me at 15 years old.
So seeing how cheating operates in families and then associating what you see with your own history is like shock therapy.
What made you able to get out of there and today be a case, as they say in the investigation, of social mobility?
Once, speaking with an investigator, I told him that I didn't fully understand why in my house I had been the one who had gone the furthest and he asked me about the case of my sister who follows me, I told him and he told me "it's just that you changed your jacket, changed your accent and camouflaged yourself, but there are people who, even if you do that, are still left behind."
There I remembered that my mother called me "el zarco" and said that my sister was going to do worse because she was a woman and black, she always called her "my black girl." My own mother was clear about those gaps.
I, by a chance of life, skipped two traps: race and gender.
The other trap I skipped was that I did not have a dysfunctional family in terms of breakup or abandonment, despite being large.
My parents are together to this day and always assumed their responsibility with us as best they could. They also wanted their children to study and that also made a difference.
Finally, did you expect the success of the documentary at the box office? Why was it also the film chosen by the public at the Macondo awards?
We believed we could connect with the audience, but our calculations were very distant from reality.
The cinema exhibitors told us that it was a film that would have a maximum of 1,500 spectators, we set the goal of having double that and in the end we reached 25,000, so it was a total surprise.
And as for the awards, it was also surprising because we were competing with fiction films and it being a documentary about inequality and poverty.
What was interesting was seeing how the film connected with audiences, people started posting on social media, expressing their support, because it made them feel like their own story was being told.
I think that generated movement, I was surprised to see how people invited people to vote for the documentary.
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