‘My Father’s Prison’: Visions du Reel Review

Dir/scr: Ivan Andres Simonovis Pertínez. Venezuela. 2023. 81mins

Personal and political perspectives intertwine awkwardly in My Father’s Prison, the directorial debut of Venezuela’s Ivan Andres Simonovis Pertinez. It traces the travails of his own father Ivan Simonovis—a top cop controversially jailed for his role in a massacre, who then languished in house-arrest until an audacious escape in 2019. Making the most of extensive home-video footage shot across several decades but executed in familiar, sometimes heavy-handed fashion, it’s an example of a documentary-director being too close to their chosen material. After the picture’s premiere in the international competition at Swiss non-fiction showcase Visions du Reel, further exposure will rely on festivals specialising in human-rights themes.

The self-imposed confinement of filial devotion proves rather harder to escape than house-arrest.

It’s hard to find much sympathy for a high-ranking police-officer such as Simonovis—who in the 1990s became head of country’s elite SWAT-type division, and whose self-regard is indicated by the naming not only of his children (Ivan and Ivana) but also his residence (La Ivanera). The latter is located in one of the wealthier areas of Caracas, a capital city notoriously racked for decades by inequalities and social injustice. This backdrop, only briefly touched upon here, is crucial to any understanding of how the Venezuelan political scene produced such a left-wing firebrand president in Hugo Chavez.

Hostile to Chavez and the Marxist-inspired ‘Chavismo’ ideals which had an impact far beyond Venezuela’s borders, Simonovis was—his family firmly believes—a handy scapegoat to blame for the Puente Llaguno Massacre of April 2002, which left 19 dead and 27 wounded. The exact circumstances of what happened on that day remain murky—Simonovis supervised the government forces dealing with a turbulent street-protest—and My Father’s Prison does little to satisfactorily clarify them other than emphasise the opinions of Simonovis’ nearest and dearest.

Despite the efforts of Simonovis’ wife Bony Pertinez, who represented him in court, he was sentenced to 30 years’ imprisonment. Initially sent to a notorious central-Caracas jail – El Helicoide, a bizarre, colossal, spaceship-like structure originally designed as a shopping mall— he was eventually placed under house-arrest in the relative luxury of La Ivanera. Much of the film observes Simonovis’ quotidian activities within those walls, fluidly interwoven with home-video footage from the 1990s and TV reports of dramatic news events featuring or impacting upon upon the family. Simonovis Pertinez’s most effective visual inspiration comes with the swearing-in of Chavez in February 1999, presented audio-only and paired with blurry images of that August’s solar eclipse to eerily apocalyptic effect.

The attitude of the Simonovis family to Chavez and his successor Nicolas Maduro is summed up by their response to the latter’s election rise to power in 2013: “This shit is never going to change!” wails dad. “Damn m*therfuckers!” agrees mum. Maduro remains in office and the situation in Venezuela remains hazardous for Simonovis’ relatives and supporters; several key personnel on this film remain anonymous in the opening and closing credits.

Working with seasoned editor Juan Soto Taborda— who recently cut another, rather more balanced study of Venezuelan father-son relations, Mo Scarpelli’s El Father Plays Himself (2020)— Simonovis Pertinez divides his film into four sections: a short prologue, Part I (pre-massacre), Part II (its aftermath) and ‘Escape’. The latter plays squarely thriller-style, with the director and his mother very much part of the action: camerawork segues from neatly-framed, tripod-mounted shots to more ragged hand-held images, while the Electo Damina’s soundtrack vigorously amps up the suspense. Throughout the running-time, however, Simonovis Pertinez relies much too strongly the score and musical/sonic effects in a complex audioscape dominated by repetitive, ominously sustained sombre notes.

Despite these lily-gilding excesses, the final section is undeniably tense and involving, even for those who may not be entirely convinced about Simonovis’s innocence—a matter which the film regards as a given. The closing credits see him shift squarely into campaigning mode: title-cards bemoan alleged abuses of power by Venezuela’s current regime, listing the names of hundreds of political prisoners and concluding with a call for justice. Such an appeal would probably carry more weight if it came from a filmmaker lacking Simonovis Pertinez’s obvious (and understandable) bias.

And at barely 80 minutes, the picture’s canvas – much of it crowded with intimate domestic detail – is simply too small to properly deal with the thorny socio-economic intricacies of Venezuela pre-, during and post-Chavez, especially given Simonovis Pertinez’s unalloyed subjectivity. The self-imposed confinement of filial devotion proves rather harder to escape than house-arrest.