Alonso’s brilliantly understated debut follows a day in the life of a migrant woodcutter totally absorbed in his ceaseless labor and the sun-bleached pampas where he works in unmitigated solitude. A poetic meditation on labor and landscape, La Libertad finds both tranquility and menacing shadows in the vast and animate wilderness unfolded within it. The documentary undercurrent of Alonso’s cinema finds its fullest expression in his vivid yet cryptically restraint portrait of Misael Saavedra, an actual woodsman, and in the film’s patient attention to the rich sounds and textures of the world defined by the young man’s ritualized work. Alonso’s most openly allegorical work, La Libertad subtly questions the “freedom” and identity alternately gained and lost by the daily burden of hard labor.