Colombia
is the world's main source of emeralds. In the Colombian
biopic Emerald Cowboy, based
on his biography, a twentysomething Eishy Hayata (played
by Luis Velasco), an American citizen born in Tokyo, one
day decides to visit Colombia. On learning firsthand that
miners are selling purloined emeralds on the streets near
the mines, he becomes so fascinated with the emerald industry
that he abandons his airline engineering job in Los Angeles
to live in Bogotá, and in 25 years is the chief
executive officer of the world's top emerald company. He
finds new emerald mines in the Andes, pays his employees
handsomely, and manages accounts of perhaps the most profitable
legitimate business in Colombia. Over the years, Colombia
changes drastically, with guns increasingly providing order
rather than the law. Hayata, therefore, encounters security
problems as he navigates his empire amid scam artists,
rival emerald merchants, guerrillas, kidnappers, corrupt
officials, the cocaine cartel, and labor unions. On March
25, 1995, ultranationalist members of a phony union seek
to shut down his business. Hayata is vulnerable because
he retains his American citizenship, though his spouse
is Colombian (played by Carolina Aristizabal), so the government
investigates Hayata to find wrongdoing, thus satisfying
the ultranationalists, but he responds that his family
is Colombian and that so is he in spirit. Hayata does not
back down to threats. His fists fly at unionists trying
to block his office on an upper floor of a Bogotá building,
and his associates join in, resulting in a retreat of the
ultranationalists to the ground floor just in time for
police to come to Hayata's rescue. On November 1, 1998,
his Colombian daughter begs Hayata to take her to the emerald
mines before her high school graduation. Although warning
her of the danger of the excursion, she insists. On exiting
from the mine, an armed band indeed attacks the Hayata
party. Outnumbered, Hayata escapes with his daughter, yet
they find their way back to the car that they use for the
trip. His daughter then graduates on schedule from a high
school in Colombia, bound for Harvard University. What
is remarkable about the film, which the Political Film
Society has nominated as best film exposé of 2003,
is that the older Hayata stiffly plays himself. Filmed
in handheld digital, the film is a quasidocumentary, codirected
by Hayata and Andrew Molina. In 2000, Hayata fell into
a coma from a gunshot wound. Emerald Cowboy serves
as his epitaph and eulogy. MH
I
want to comment on this film
