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In 1819, during a military campaign against Spanish colonial rule, Simon Bolivar crossed the Colombian highlands. ParamoHis troops, completely unprepared for the frigid temperatures and rugged terrain, barely managed to survive. Most of his men (and their horses) froze to death and were thrown into the lagoon, where they have been buried ever since. This beautiful yet harsh landscape is the backdrop for Pablo Alvarez Mesa’s “Journey in the Wilderness.” Lake SoldadoA poetic meditation on how nature encompasses human history.
Instead of characters and stories, Lake Soldado Featuring beautiful footage of the páramo and occasional narration by locals and scientists, Álvarez Mesa creates a meditative atmosphere that the film’s experimental structure sustains throughout. Almost without us realizing it, the environmental and social stories we hear in the Colombian Andes begin to intertwine.
Lake Soldado
Directed by: Pablo Alvarez Mesa
Screenplay: Pablo Alvarez Mesa
Colombia and Canada
2024
take FragileA long shot focusing on this strange shrub, reminiscent of a giant artichoke or succulent, leads to a scientific explanation for the plant’s importance. Fragile It belongs to the same family as the sunflower and plays a major role in the Earth’s water cycle. Paramo And onwards. They absorb water from the humid air and release it through their roots into the soil, depositing sediments underground that eventually become rivers. “These streams connect us to the Orinoco, to the eastern plains,” a soft voice says, pointing to one of South America’s longest rivers and the famous plains that surround it. “What we do here is clearly reflected there.”
Social reality ParamoBut we have never benefited from such solidarity. For hundreds of years, Fragile It was known by another name to the Muisca, or indigenous people. ParamoFor them, the plant has a strong association with the sun, but the meaning of the plant, as it was later called in Spanish, was beyond their understanding. Until the FARC guerrilla group signed a peace agreement with the government in 2016, large parts of the páramo were inaccessible to ordinary Colombians, and the threat of renewed conflict there remains, a situation reminiscent of Bolivar’s own failed integration project. Paramo Although he was ultimately successful, his dream of uniting Latin America in a single political community was not realized.
The interconnected ecosystem masks a fragmented society: indigenous communities, Spanish settlers, modern armies – these peoples are set against the backdrop of the collisions of centuries of human history, but they all intersect with the natural constants of the páramo that transcend any particular culture. Lake Soldado Build up these kinds of details iteratively. Paramobats, minerals, and mists, collapsing humanity’s time and past upheavals.
The exercise feels startlingly appropriate for a country embroiled in decades of conflict and finally determined to maintain some sort of peace. Perhaps it’s not surprising that a common thread emerges in Colombia’s eternal idol, Bolivar. Lake Soldado The film’s only non-modern oral narrative is heard by a man with a Spanish accent reciting Bolívar’s mystical poem, “My Delirium in Chimborazo,” which contains a meditation on human greatness before the universe.
“A feverish delirium engulfed my mind. I felt as if I was burning with a strange supernatural fire. The Colombian gods had taken control of me. Suddenly, Time stood before me, burdened by the centuries, in the form of a venerable old man, frowning and hunched, bald and wrinkled, with a scythe in his hand,” Bolivar wrote. Álvarez Mesa seems to remind us that even this larger-than-life man recognized that the natural world takes precedence over all else. Paramowill live on as a kind of archive, with or without us.
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