士兵湖 La Laguna del Soldado

Two hundred years after Simon Bolívar’s campaign to liberate Colombia, The Soldier’s Lagoon retraces his journey across the high-altitude marshlands, searching for glimpses of his ghost in this historically contested territory. As we navigate the terrain through the dense fog that seems suspended in the air, a lush ecosystem saturated with a myriad of oral narratives emerges—one that provokes timely and timeless questions about colonialism, indigeneity and land dominance.

The film assembles striking 16mm landscape footage, a sophisticated soundscape, sourced archival passages read in voice-over, and testimonies from preservationists to unearth a patient study of living and elusive archive, gracefully exploring the complicated intersection of oral narratives, political outcomes, and territory. Documenting a region facing very real and urgent environmental repercussions that are a direct result of its historical narratives, this poetic and atmospheric work holds, above all its revelations, a deep reverence for the sacredness of land and its future.