7 – La Sabana y la Montaña
(Savana and Mountain, Portugal/Uruguay, 2024)
Direct: Paulo Carneiro
Guion: Paulo Carneiro y Alex Piperno
Duration: 77 minutes
Interpreters: Aida Fernandes, Maria Loureiro, Elisabete Pires, Daniel Loureiro, Nelson Gomes, Carlos Libo Y Paulo Sanches
It is exhibited in the Lugones room on Thursday 8, Saturday 10 and Sunday at 9 p.m.
The story of La Sabana and the Mountain begins in the late last decade, when the young Portuguese filmmaker Paulo Carneiro He met a group of people from Covas do Barroso, a town in the north of their country with just over 300 inhabitants that would soon house The largest open -pit lithium mine in Europedeveloped by the British company Savannah Resources. Carneiro listened to the aid orders to spread the situation, but he did little and nothing because his head was monopolized by the international launch of Bostophriohis first feature film. Only during the pandemic, videos in social networks about the brutal deforestation in the area through, it took awareness of the environmental strip that was being carried out. Then he decided to go with the idea of filming some videos and circulating on the Internet, although very quickly he realized that the cinema was a overcoming tool to make visible the cause.
Carneiro did not make a traditional documentary or a complaint: there is no place for archive images or speaking heads dumping data and narrating the hardships of the locals. But La Sabana and the Mountain Nor is it a classic fiction, of those that present actors and actresses putting themselves in the skin of characters more or less imagined to parliament the lines of a script. First exhibited in the fortnight of Cannes’ filmmakers last year, La Sabana and the Mountain stop at a midpoint where it becomes impossible to discern what is real and what does not, where fiction ends and the documentary begins. Their device is characterized by having the residents themselves “acting” of themselves and recreating various situations lived during the eve at the arrival of the mining company to an area declared as a world agricultural heritage by the United Nations in 2018.
But the “recreational” should not be taken literally, because Carneiro puts the neighbors to play by putting them in a story with much of Western and in which they must fight the (fictitious) operators of the company, as if he wanted to grant them the power to create stories larger than their own to address their experiences. The militancy against the mine is glimpsed in the recurring assemblies, in the dialogues between neighbors, in the communal meetings, in the attempts to know of the mouth of the mining employees at what stage the project is and in the protest songs that make up one of the settlers and call the resistance and collective struggle: here, as in The Eternalutanobody is saved alone.
All this is mixed with the popular parties and traditions of a place whose temporality is blurred. The result is a film that balances the light humor and the weather of timeless fable (There is some of Miguel Gomes’ cinema fantasy on the device) with a strong political positioning about the relationship between the land and its occasional tenants. It is an issue that, based on the need for lithium for electric batteries, has generated a current of films that inquire into the diverse consequences of the over exploitation of natural resources. Alcarrásby Carla Simón, The beastsby Rodrigo Sorogoyen, or the cinema of the Chinese Jia Zhangke are some audiovisual examples of a conception of progress according to which everything must be taken ahead, including human beings.
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