The Soldier’s Lagoon + Bicentenario [Q&A]

Screening with filmmaker Pablo Alvarez-Mesa in attendance

THE SOLDIER’S LAGOON (Canada/Colombia, 2024, 77 minutes)

Two hundred years after Simón Bolívar’s liberation campaign across Colombia, The Soldier’s Lagoon retraces The Liberator’s journey across the high-altitude marshlands while searching for glimpses of his ghost still present in this historically contested territory. Reflecting on the construction of oral history and its relation to the land, La Laguna del Soldado traverses the páramo, a living and elusive archive, navigating through the dense fog suspended between Simón Bolívar’s past and Colombia’s present. La Laguna del Soldado is the second in a three-part series of films exploring the intersection of oral narratives, political outcomes, and the territories marked by Simón Bolívar’s passage during the Liberation Campaign of Colombia in 1819. The first completed part is Bicentenario (2021).

BICENTENARIO (Canada/Colombia, 2020, 42 minutes)

Two hundred years after Simón Bolívar’s liberation campaign in Colombia, Bicentenario retraces Bolívar’s journey across the Country, searching for his ghost still present in the contested territory. Creatively intersecting the traditions of landscape film, oral traditions, and political essay, Bicentenario cinematically reveals the collision of history and myth inscribed on the territory of what would become an inevitably failed state – the Great Colombia.