Gólgota Picnic

Five people gather for a picnic in a place that is more evocative of mounds of fast food meat than of Christ’s suffering and death. At the end of the evening, a battlefield remains in which people are left ravaged, filthy and smeared – fallen angels, destroyed by excessive consumerism and quarrels with God. Evil has long existed on earth: “I cannot teach you to fill the world with weapons: you have already done so”, is just one example of lessons taught here. In “Gólgota Picnic”, Argentinian director Rodrigo García makes a furious indictment of western society. He aims at museums as modern-day temples in which Christian iconography representing torture – crowns of thorns, castigation and crucifixion – is presented even to children. Blood and beauty go together, for example in passages of Bach’s St. Matthew Passion, which tells of suffering and death while meat is churned through a mincer on the big screen and worms crawl bury into ground flesh. García presents a macabre picnic, using consumerism as a stage, and provokes a serious, controversial debate on Christ’s promise of healing that founders due to human self-empowerment. Finally, there is extreme chaos, made up of silence, isolation, and deceleration – beauty that has to be endured. And without redemption.