Mill Valley Film Festival 45 (Oct. 6-176 2022)

[Chris Knipp]

PABLO CASACUBERTA: WE DREAM OF ROBOTS/SOÑAR ROBOTS



TRAILER

Uruguayan kids competing with robots form lasting bonds and inspire plans for the future - and your own mind may be blown

This delightful documentary is about hope, progress, and the future. It is in chapters. It first introduces us to some of the young people. Some of them appear mere children - fifth graders often vary in size - but when they start to talk, they are brilliant. The fascinating thing is that they are from obscure towns, some mere villages, in remote parts of Uruguay, a country that borders on Argentina and Brazil, but is much smaller and less noticed. One of them travels four hours each way to go to school. He reminded me of the young winner of an annual oratory contest in France in the inspiring 2017 doc Speak Up/À voix haute: La force de la parole, who also traveled hours to and from school. We Dream of Robots is a beautiful and well made film, visually a delight, especially the early parts, and it has a beautiful heart.

Sometimes hardship inspires. Maybe not having the internet, as is the case for many of these kids, can be an advantage, and not having a smart phone, also the case for some, makes you rely on yourself, and think. When these kids get together, the level of talk is impressive. They're thinkers. They could interview Noam Chomsky. The burden of this film is that the worldwide exploration of robotics by young people, and the big international competition held for the first time in Latin America, which two teams of the Uruguayan kids attend competing against 70 teams from all over the world, and which is the penultimate chapter - with one of the Uruguayan teams coming in third - inspires thinking about science, and about progress, and solving real problems, big ones.

One boy recounts that the young people in his area had been experiencing an epidemic of psychological issues (This has been widespread in the US too - why? The stresses of the world can't be escaped, even sans internet.) Kids were cutting themselves right and left, he says, and there were teen suicides: but the joint involvement in robots changed that. It created community, it gave the young people a new lease on life, and the general mood improved, the self-harm ended.

A "robot" is a gadget, a block of lego shapes - that runs around on a maze. It goes over obstacles. It raises and lowers things. It stays within limits. It can have any shape you want. Working on robots, these scientifically gifted kids conceive of all kinds of solutions, like developing environmentally safe transportation, like clean power, like carrying automation further in industrial supply and shipping so people can focus on the higher level technical problems. Robotics is an entry into the whole world of computer animation and design. As one bright kid says, "Everything is interconnected."

The age level for the international convention-contest is 9-16. Mathematical and to some extent scientific talent can come early, like musical talent, one of the reasons why one of the leading team members ultimately is a little guy, and why this film is so exciting and inspiring.

It's nice to see something upbeat. But apart from the remote, hardscrabble, agrarian envononments these kids mostly come from, the contest is extremely stressful. Part of the contest is exchanging your robot with another contestant's, learning to operate it, competing using the other person's technology. This is very challenging, as well as a last minute change in the ground rules of the game, and obviously teaches teamwork and quick thinking and improvisation. But it's also all very intense and nerve-wracking, a contrast to the kids' quiet rural world in which they developed their ideas and built their systems.

And yet they succeed, and their joy is a delight to behold, the hugs and the crying. But then, heartbreak comes in the year following, when the global Covid pandemic arrives, and despite the Uruguayan team's great showing and the third place for one of them, the competitions are shut down for two years! They go from joy and new self-worth to devastating disappointment.

But they're kids, they are tough and adaptable. The sparse rural environments and long commutes made them tough. The final chapter is therefore a story of compromise and regrouping and hope. The Uruguayan kids on the winning team know that this success in the international competition is the stuff that lifelong friendships are made of. The other Uruguayan youths decide they enjoyed meeting and working together so much they want to go on meeting, and, doing so, they discuss and work on all sorts of new things. Ultimately, they realize their experience and their conversations have changed them - even for some like one outspoken girl who has decided not to go into science but into arts - and that continuing with the international competitions isn't necessary because their lives and outlook have already been changed forever. This is a film for Uruguayans, where it was shown in movie theaters, that revolutionizes their self-concept and above all their notion that the people of the interior of the country are backward or limited and without potential. Not so.

It is nice to see a documentary that is so positive. The kids are absolutely charming, vibrant, impressively smart, and cute. Good for ages 10+, I Dream of Robots is in Spanish with English subtitles. This title is also available via streaming and it the North American Premiere.

Pablo Casacuberta, who was born in Montevideo, Uruguay, is not only a filmmaker but a writer and visual artist. He has long been a fiction writer and has won Uruguayan National Literature Prize and having trained as an artist in Sheffield, he exhibited in New York, Barcelona, Buenos Aires, Yokohama, and Venice. In film/video he started as a producer of Alberto Cuaron's Children of Men in 2006. He was a crew member of Terrence Malick on Knight of Cups in 2015 and worked on the TV documentary series "Tu Casa Es Mi Casa " (2021). In We Dream of Robots, he struck documentary gold.

We Dream of Robots/Soñar Robots, 85 mins., was screened for this review as part of MVFF45, the Mill Valley Film Festival. It has been showing in multiple venues in Uruguay but it is not included in his filmography on IMDb yet.