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The physical sites of our world hold countless layers of history. In some places, we can immediately see them, and in others, the traces of the past lie just outside our field of view. Following her feature films Señoritas (2013) and This Time Tomorrow (2016), Lina Rodríguez reunited with her sound designer to examine a familiar place: the area surrounding Lake Guatavita, which inspired the legend of El Dorado. The filmmaker’s cinematic eye sweeps over this sacred landscape, normally filled with tourists—capturing the intensity of the light, the textures of the mountains, the profound scope of the landscape, the movement of the wind and the flow of the water. Filmed using a Samsung S8 smartphone camera and firmly rooted in the contemporary moment, Rodríguez’ short reframes this disturbing place, allowing us to consider how the natural world redefines our sense of history.

This is one of the four films produced by the Instituto Cinematográfico del Estado in the 1940s under the premise of showing different regions of Argentina through visually plastic and formally sophisticated films. Amanda Lucía Turquetto, a graphic designer close to the concrète movement, directed at least two of these, Vendimia and Playa Grande, the latter together with the artist Héctor Bernabó (alias Carybé). The awakening of the beachtown refers at some point to the beginning of Man with a Movie Camera, but then certain shots bring the film closer to the Nice described by Jean Vigo—although without irony. Other times, the fascination with water is reminiscent of Ralph Sterne’s H20. It is possible that these films were on the minds of the directors, but beyond these references appears a beautiful description of women, one that drives them away from the cliché of the mother to which almost all Argentine cinema had destined them; instead we see delicate Amazons who have taken over the beach as if it were a space to which only they deserve access. – Andrés Levinson