GFF 2010: Pachamama

A father and son tread the old trade route through the Bolivian Andes, bartering salt from the Uyuni flats near their home for regional produce - the corn, quinua, pumpkin and melon that constitute their staples - in a story about nature and coming-of-age, whose leading character is the land. Despite the remarkable physicality of its youngest actors, the people of Pachamama are generally figures and faces, not emotive performers. The plot is spare yet elegant, operating on an expressive level - it is told through tightly bound but loosely structured vignettes (like the song of the boy whose father dies in a Potosi mine), intoxicating dreamscapes and tangible, phenomenal landscapes. The spiritual beauty of Bolivia makes the photography easy: glacial mountains, rich red fields, fairy-lit lakes present themselves as wonders. But the sheer sense of otherness come from masterful editing and composition by a cultural outsider, Japanese director Toshifumi Matsushita. A naturalist ethnography somehow made exhilarating, surreal and sublime.