The Soldiers Lagoon (2024, Pablo Alvarez-Mesa)

La Laguna del Soldado makes up the second part of a trilogy dedicated to Simon Bolivar. Pablo Alvarez-Mesa conjures up the spirit of the Libertador on the sites where his battles took place, sounding out the persisting violence in Colombia’s political and social landscape. Completed on the 200th anniversary of the country’s independence, in 2020, Bicentenario explored the question of what national commemorations actually celebrate. This new film hones in on the setting of one particularly well-known episode of the liberation campaign, the Crossing of the Andes, when the pro-independence army made its way across the high plateaus of the Eastern Andes, taking the arduous path through the Páramo de Pisba. The bodies of over one hundred soldiers who died of cold or hunger were found in a lagoon turned mass grave where a commemorative stone now stands. While Bicentenario evoked a séance or an exorcism, La Laguna del Soldado is a feverish dream prefaced by Bolivar’s poem “Mi delirio sobre el Chimborazo”. In the film, the poem is recited by filmmaker Camilo Restrepo, his voice the first of a chorus calling attention to the native and non-native features of the site, its colonial history, the environmental impact of military presence, as well as the need for conservation approaches mindful of local communities. Shots of misty landscapes dissolve into one another across watery transitions, their deceptive tranquillity shaken by disruptive experimental sequences in a film of breathtaking beauty.