The Boatman

So much can change in a lifetime….or five.

El Colchon, ‘The Mattress’, is a boatman with 40 years experience rowing people back and forth the five minutes it takes to cross the Riachuelo in Buenos Aires. From grandfather to grandson, his family have crossed the same tiny stretch of water for five generations and over a hundred years.
El Colchon was ‘‘born on the banks of the Riachuelo’’. He dreams of when he went swimming and fishing as a boy as he rows across one of the most polluted rivers in the world. A once beautiful landscape became an industrial port, and the river is now a blackened forgotten cesspit.

Still the boatman plies his trade, charging 50 centavos to cross between La Boca and Isla Maciel in the most dangerous part of town. El Colchon is a warm chatty man known by everybody, and a powerful witness to a century of human development in one small place.

Visually arresting, shot on Super-8, ‘The Boatman’ is the lyrical tale of a man and a river.

Dylan Howitt

Dylan Howitt began making films at a young age with a Super8 camera, before studying Fine Art where he worked in photography, animation and video. He then switched to documentary making and has spent the last 13 years making scores of films all over the world. The overriding theme is giving voice to the voiceless, to talk about issues of social change, justice and our natural environment. From making films with kids in the rubbish dumps of Guatemala City, to sculptors working with guns in Mozambique or Filipino cleaners in London he tries to tell the most personal and powerful stories in an arresting way.

Dylan Howitt Filmography (Highlights):

1996
Celtic Enemy
12 minutes/Hi-8. Villagers and tree dwellers fight the spread of open cast mining in South Wales.Winner: Tokyo Video Festival/BAVA/Earthvision.

1998
Eswin
7 minutes/Hi-8. True story of a man ‘disappeared’ in Guatemala City, told by his cousin.

2000
Suits and Savages
38 minutes/DV. Global policy makers in the spotlight – A journey from the forest gardens of South India to the corridors of power in Washington DC.

Not this Time, the story of the Simon Jones memorial campaign
16 minutes/DV. Tragic story of a young man killed on his first day of work. ‘One of the most powerful pieces of film-making I’ve ever seen’ Libby Brooks (The Guardian).

Taking back the land
4 minutes/DV. Brazil’s landless movement creating solutions for city overcrowding by squatting unused land.

2002-5
Rooted x7
26 minutes/DVCAM. A 10 year old boy, born in the UK of mixed English/Kenyan parentage, returns to East Africa to discover what his life would have been like had he grown up there. Made similar films in India, Somaliland, Morocco, St. Vincent and Brazil.

Voces Argentinas
16 minutes/DV & Super-8. Mixing conversation, song and poetry: Argentinian voices tell tales of survival since economic collapse. Winner Festival du Cinema de Paris 2003.

2003
The Shoeshine President
15 minutes/DV. From shoeshine boy to president of Brazil, the incredible story of Luis Ignacio ‘Lula’ da Silva.

Oil be damned: the case against the Baku-Ceyhan pipeline
19 minutes/DV. Everything that’s wrong with BP’s new Caspian oil pipeline.

Life interrupted
12’/DVCAMWorld renowned photojournalist Don McCullin travels to Zambia and South Africa 3 years on to revisit communities ravaged by HIV/AIDS.

2005
Tree of Guns
29’/DVCAM/BBC A sculpture made of guns contains the history of war torn Mozambique and its moves towards peace.

Juba y washina
30'/DVCAM Drama
3 days in the life of a Colombian cleaner in London

2006

Bolivia for Sale
27’/DVCAM
Devastating privatization policies form the background to Evo Morales’ Victory last year.

Forests on the Frontline
27’/DVCAM/Community channel
Investigating the destruction of the Amazon in Bolivia.