Doors 7:30p
Program 8:00p

UnionDocs
352 Onderdonk Ave
Ridgewood, NY

We’re thrilled to welcome filmmaker Pablo Álvarez-Mesa for a screening of his hauntingly evocative feature, The Soldier’s Lagoon, followed by a conversation with the director.

The Soldier’s Lagoon is a shape-shifting, poetic meditation on landscape, history, and memory. Two hundred years after Simón Bolívar’s liberation campaign, Álvarez-Mesa retraces the Liberator’s path across Colombia’s high-altitude marshlands, searching for traces of the past embedded in the land. The film takes its name from a body of water in the Andean mountains, where the remains of fallen soldiers are said to rest, lingering in a place where myth and memory intertwine.

Álvarez-Mesa’s approach conjures an atmosphere both observational and hallucinatory, where the land itself seems to speak of contested histories. Through painterly 16mm cinematography and layered sound design, The Soldier’s Lagoon considers how history continues to reverberate across landscapes—through the voices of the Muisca Indigenous confederation, through environmental policies that entangle preservation and restriction, and through the spectral echoes of those who walked these paths centuries before. Double exposures summon ghosts in the mist, sonar-mapped bat chirps hint at unrecorded presences, and Bolívar’s legacy unfolds in the flickering textures of 16mm.

A singular, formally daring work of nonfiction, The Soldier’s Lagoon expands the possibilities of documentary cinema. Don’t miss this special screening and conversation!

Note: This event also marks the kickoff of our workshop, Poetics of Time: Between the Shot & the Edit—a three-day workshop led by Pablo, exploring the relationships between cinematography and montage in nonfiction cinema. Check it out!

Program

The Soldier’s Lagoon (La Laguna del Soldado)

75 mins, 2024

Program Duration: 75 mins

Bios

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.