Deep in the heartlands of Argentina resides Omar, a gaucho who goes about the business of farming cattle and protecting his range with an amazing competence, all the time wearing his signature boyna flat beret. He lives with his 94-year old mother and takes care of his 4-year old grand-daughter Libertad when her father is away.
But like everywhere else on the planet, climate change is effecting profound and fundamental change. The plains are turning to dust and Omar’s herd of cattle is dying.
The first shot of the film shows a dead cow being dragged and left within what amounts to a bovine graveyard. Later Omar must build a winch to support a cow which is so weak it faints each time it feeds its calf. “They die of death,” he laments.
He deconstructs and re-erects a wind turbine to catch whatever wisps of wind may power the generator. Together with a friend he goes out at night to hunt the lion which is killing more of his animals. He oversees the restoration of a well so that the beasts can have respite from continual thirst. And he beats down the spontaneous fires that catch among the grasses.
And he finds time to indulge his beautiful grand-daughter Libertad who resembles a creature out of myth, her only disappointment in life being there are no longer ostriches on the land, but that doesn’t stop her scanning the horizon when she is driving with Omar.
Omar’s mother is elderly and is preparing for her passing. She knows she doesn’t want to be buried beside her husband, whose grave she tends. They would argue too much, she laughs, so she would rather be buried in the city with her parents.
To Libertad she tells the tragic story of Difunta Correa, who followed her husband to war and died exhausted after feeding their child, who survived. Difunta is the patron saint to whom she prays in times of need. “Her soul will reach out to you,” the old woman tells Libertad.
As mesmeric and intoxicating as the film is, director Alexis Franco tells how he held back from painting an over-romanticised picture of the culture. “At the beginning, I was going to be more folkloric, more about the gaucho life, which is like the cowboy life here in the USA, and which is very beautiful in Argentina,” director Franco tells Business Doc Europe from Austin, Texas, where he has lived for the past 22 years.
“But I realized that I have something deeper and something more simple [to say] so I put the focus into this, into my family. But you are right. In a certain way, it is a little like a Western; the dust, these horses, this big land and these cattle. But honestly, I didn’t want to focus on the beauty of the gaucho. I wanted to do something extremely simple, honest, and crude. I think that I took a big risk, not very commercial, but I wanted to make it simple, simple. Going back to the basics, like you said, water, death…not about paradise, but [about] death the way it is.”
Of course, the film also has fundamental climate concerns at its core. “They [the gauchos] fight very hard with the environment,” Franco underlines. “One thing that is not very clear in the film, they have fires, huge fires, and basically they lose everything almost every year. And it is happening more often. And another big thing that is happening – when I was a child and I was there there were a lot of animals, ostriches everywhere, pumas. Right now you don’t see anything. There is definitely a big change that is affecting everybody.”
And with social change comes social migration. “In that country, in our country, it’s very hard to get the new generation to continue to work so hard in those places. So I think we are losing the gaucho culture.”
Franco discusses the female characters existing in a rugged world “that is very much about men.” He stresses, “I have a grandmother, which is the wisdom, and then Libertad is the innocence.” The child, at the beginning of her life, is tough but nevertheless vulnerable within an environment under threat and which is populated by wild predators that come at night, and by snakes and wild fires. To Franco, therefore, Libertad resembles a “crystal” that must be protected.
Franco also tells of how his very personal project came into being. He is an architect by training, who also works as assistant director to no less a luminary than US-based Italian director Roberto Minervini, whom he refers to as his “friend and mentor.” After Minervini completed the film What You Gonna Do When the World Is on Fire? (2017) he advised Franco that he was ready to embark on his first film as a director.
“Until then, I was always searching for stories. It was something natural for me to go out, travel, immerse myself in foreign cultures, talk and live with people, and collect stories and anecdotes, always in constant search to collaborate with him,” he writes in his film notes.
“One day, we were discussing the story of my family: a tale of gauchos, of rustic people living in harsh environments far away in deserts. It’s a story of drought and fire, death, and birth. My intention was to convince him to film in Argentina, but his response was that this could be the core of my first film, and if it was important to me, it would also be important to the audience. A film that connects the history of my family with an iconic yet mysterious gaucho culture in South America,” Franco ends.
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