Nicaragua: Documentary “A Dream of Revolution”: When the door was briefly open

The purpose of all revolutions is joy and happiness, says the Nicaraguan writer Gioconda Belli, who lives in exile, including in Costa Rica. In her documentary “A Dream of Revolution,” director Petra Hoffmann traced the arc, from the awakening and euphoria of the Sandinistas’ victory over the then dictator Anastasio Somoza Debayle, to the failure of 1990 and the catastrophe of 2006. But first built: schools, medical care, and the land is redistributed. Large landowners are being expropriated. At the same time, the next battle begins, a civil war between the revolutionaries and the Contras financed by the USA.

In the first part of her film, Hoffmann tells this story from the perspective of leftists from Western countries who went to Nicaragua in the 1980s to practice, as it was called at the time, “practical solidarity.” In the fields, in the construction of houses, wells and roads, in the literacy of the country. 15,000 brigadists come from West Germany. There was no event in post-war Germany that resulted in such a wave of solidarity on the internationalist left as the revolution in Nicaragua in 1979.

The archive recordings that Hoffmann compiled show enthusiastic people who suddenly have the opportunity to do something different with their lives than what they were originally intended to do. Petra Hoffmann was in Nicaragua during her time as a student and her film is, not least, an autobiographical retrospective. The interviews with the veteran activists today give the impression that something has opened up here for a short time: possibilities for social redesign. What sounds abstract became concrete in the experience of building and creating something together that was not subject to established economic mechanisms, or at least not to those based on a market economy.

The repression of the Contras is cited in “A Dream of Revolution,” along with the Sandinistas’ maintenance of conscription and the scarcity economy inherited from the Somoza era and which persists despite all efforts, as the reasons for the failure of the revolution. In 1990, the anti-Sandinista Union Nacional Opositora surprisingly won the election. The dream, the end of which Hoffmann mainly talks about, does not completely collapse at this point, but only sixteen years later, with the election victory of the Sandinista Daniel Ortega, who quickly develops into a dictator and has former comrades-in-arms arrested and killed. The second part of the film shifts the focus away from the solidarity of the Western left and describes the lives of the former fighters in exile against the regime of the comrade of old.

“A Dream of Revolution” is a film about failure and, despite its consistently sober demeanor, is very sad. The failure of the revolution is not told as necessary, but in direct comparison – on the one hand the Contras and later the uniformed police battalions of the Ortega government, on the other comparatively delicate revolutionaries, musicians and writers – shows that direct violence has an easier time on the way to victory.

In retrospect, however, an eye for what is possible remains. “A Dream of Revolution” does not present a complex analysis of revolutions and their failure, but rather starts from the people who were playing in Nicaragua and thus also in Nicaragua with their bodies, their work and their art (writers and musicians). a big role in this film) were directly involved. Surprisingly, the film doesn’t romanticize this story. And still manages to find a montage that documents not only the violence and repression, but also the pain and sadness in the face of failed opportunities.

“A Dream of Revolution”: Germany 2024, Director: Petra Hoffmann. 109 minutes. Playing in the cinema.