The Soldier’s Lagoon (2024)
Pablo Álvarez-Mesa
The Soldier’s Lagoon, Pablo Álvarez-Mesa, Colombia/Canada, 16mm > digital, 75 min, 2024
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 historical narratives and their environmental repercussions,The Soldier’s Lagoon traverses the páramo, a living and elusive archive, navigating through the dense fog suspended between Simón Bolívar’s past and Colombia’s present.
The Soldier’s Lagoon 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.
Streaming Details
This film is available to stream globally.
Program Partners
This film is co-presented with Canadian Filmmakers Distribution Centre and Spectacle Theater.
Image credits: all artworks, portraits and stills courtesy the artist © Pablo Álvarez-Mesa.
About the artist
Pablo Álvarez-Mesa (Colombia/Canada) is a filmmaker and cinematographer born in Medellín in 1980. His work is motivated by a long-standing interest in “structures of social control, especially soft power, which is a profound way through which societies and individuals relate and integrate ideologies and positions. Exploring this through cinema is quite interesting to me, as the politics of everyday life are often not obvious but rather embedded into patterns of behaviour and culture.” He received an MFA in Film Production from Concordia University (2014). His work has been widely exhibited at festivals, museums, and other venues internationally, including The Museum of Modern Art, Anthology Film Archives, FICUNAM, International Film Festival Rotterdam, Hot Docs, Rencontres Internationales du Documentaire de Montréal, Arsenal, Open City Documentary Festival, L’Alternativa Festival de Cinema Independent de Barcelona, and DokuFest International Documentary and Short Film Festival. He is the recipient of awards from Les Rendez-vous Québec Cinéma, Sundance Documentary Film Program, Visions du Réel, Punto de Vista Festival, and Banff Centre for the Arts. He is an affiliate member of the Centre for Oral History and Digital Storytelling at Concordia University, and an alumnus of Berlinale Talents and Canadian Film Centre. He was an artist in residence at Fogo Island Arts (2021).