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Seeking to rewrite history, Icíar Bollaín’s Even the Rain recalls the ways in which past confrontations can leave a mark upon the present. Connecting the conquest of the New World with the 2000 Cochabamba Water Protests, Even the Rain is a dramatic marriage of indifference, deception, and hope, where reality and fiction coalesce.

Even the Rain stars Mexican actor Gael García Bernal as film director Sebastián, who brings his actors and small-budget crew to Bolivia to shoot a movie. While Bernal (who starred as Che Guevera twice, in The Motorcycle Diaries and the made-for-TV movie Fidel) no longer plays the revolutionary, Sebastián’s artistic vision revolts against itself, with the help of some local protestors.

The film begins its journey in a realistic vein when a Spanish film producer, Costa (Luis Tosar), seeks cheap extras and labour (at a measly $2 per day) in Cochabamba, Bolivia, for a film that re-casts Columbus as a cruel exploiter instead of a heroic explorer. Panning across an endless line of curious locals, the film fixes itself with the character of Daniel (Juan Carlos Aduviri), who speaks out frequently, inciting trouble out of a sense of personal injustice. Aduviri steals the audience’s attention with his genuine acting and half-playful, half-tragic face. Hiring the locals is efficient and dangerous, as tensions rise against the government in the wake of a 300 per cent increase in water prices from a foreign company. Further, even the rain the locals collect as drinking water is subject to imperial ownership laws.

Antón (Karra Elejalde), the drunk who plays Cristóbal Colón in Sebastián’s film, provides Even the Rain with a necessary dose of humour and skepticism. Speaking to Sebastián about the film, he proclaims: “This isn’t art, this is fucking propaganda!” Statements like these make the viewer wonder how much of this movie is constructed to incite temporary emotional responses, but in the end the film will stick with you for a while.

The dynamics of order and reality reach their height when the film set becomes the site of an actual power struggle between the corrupt police and enraged locals. While the symbolism is not subtle, the message is provocative and compelling. Though the final burning-at-the-stake scene is anxiously put onto film, celebration is muted by a mounting cry for action. In Even the Rain, the most captivating characters seek their own crucifixion. Fortunately, Bollaín and her crew cooperated with locals and contributed little gifts to the barrio of each extra in the film (in a video interview she mentions donating 2,000 bricks for a school).

Why would the average movie-goer labour through a foreign film about an equally foreign issue, the privatization of water? Screenwriter Paul Laverty realizes the futility of documentary style and breaks up the distance between the subject matter and the viewer by subverting the system of suspended belief (where viewers engross themselves in a fiction) and implicating the viewer in the reality of the characters who seem equally real.

Even good intentions can run awry, as Sebastián starts to embody the less-than-noble conqueror who wishes to be remembered as saviour, but forgets human reality in order to construct a golden throne (before it consumes his film). In a somewhat conventional Hollywood gesture, Costa proves that small, personable actions, not grand schemes, are what make a humanitarian.