EL CORRAL Y EL VIENTO

In an enigmatic prologue, a teenager plays with his cat on the bed in his tiny room: as the shot lasts, this palpable idleness drives a growing violence towards the animal. In these heights, time stretches and spreads out, vacuous despite the daily chores of rural life. We are only half surprised when Miguel Hilari’s voice-over recalls him writing as a child in his diary that a brief visit to his father’s village, Santiago de Okola, filled him with an ill-defined fear. All is calm in the Bolivian mountains. The teenager takes a calf to suckle, dresses up or flies kites with his sister. In an even more direct face-to-face with the camera, younger schoolchildren, encouraged by their teacher, recite or sing poems and songs of Quechua and Aymara independence. Equally ethnographic and theoretical, with an attention to framing and duration, this film convincingly translates an individual’s search for a place amongst his people – a filmmaker’s search too. Uncomfortably nested in this wind-swept hamlet where few of his family now remain (only his uncle still lives there), Miguel Hilari’s position of part-outsider enables him to extract a nuanced vision of the acculturation of the campesinos, the peasants. Alternating between contemplation and criticism, he thus avoids any facile discourse on the regrets of exile or the withering of a culture and captures the foundations of these phenomena more subtly.

Charlotte Garson