Skip to content

The Soldier’s Lagoon

La Laguna del Soldado
Pablo Álvarez-Mesa
2024 Colombia, Canada 77' Spanish, Castilian
Tue 26
March
20h30
Pompidou Cinéma 1
Book
+ débat / Q&A
Sat 30
March
16h00
MK2 Beaubourg
Book
© Pablo Alvarez Mesa
© Pablo Alvarez Mesa
© Pablo Alvarez Mesa

Reflecting on the construction of oral history and its relation to the land, the film traverses the páramo, a living and elusive archive, navigating through the dense fog suspended between Simon Bolivar’s past and Colombia’s present.


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 2021, 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.

Antoine Thirion

Pablo Álvarez-Mesa is a filmmaker, cinematographer and editor working mainly in non fiction, whose films have played and earned awards at international film festivals including Berlinale, IFFR, Viennale, MoMA, Visions du Réel, and RIDM. His work in cinema lies in the relationship between fact and fiction; between what is recalled and what is inevitably constructed. Pablo is Sundance Doc Fund grantee, an affiliate member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, and a Berlinale Talents, Banff Centre for the Arts and Canadian Film Centre alumnus.

Tue 26
March
20h30
Pompidou Cinéma 1
Book
+ débat / Q&A
Sat 30
March
16h00
MK2 Beaubourg
Book
Production :
Pablo Alvarez Mesa
Photography :
Pablo Alvarez Mesa
Sound :
Alex Lane, Erin Ryan / Pablo Alvarez Mesa
Editing :
Pablo Alvarez Mesa
Original music :
Stefan Schneider, Alex Lane
Copy contact :
Pablo Alvarez Mesa soldierslagoonfilm@gmail.com

You might also be interested in