The Soldier's Lagoon

The Soldier’s Lagoon, the second film in a trilogy, retraces Simón Bolívar’s 1819 liberation campaign across Colombia’s high-altitude marshlands. Moving through the Andean páramo as a living archive, the film reflects on oral history, contested land, and the lingering presence of the Liberator, suspended between past and present.

Pablo Álvarez Mesa: ‘The path Bolívar took for his crossing was recently used by armed groups including the guerrillas who controlled the area for over 50 years. The sensory meditation unearthed the afterlives of violence that linger in the country’s waterways, providing a surface to engage with the past and its life in the present. How does a country internalise trauma and how is it reproduced across generations?

How can we coexist in a territory that is both a threat due to its endemic violence and the very source of life? Immersing viewers in the liminal space of the páramo — between past and future, in a region that has been the site of a daring military passage that led to successful wars of liberation — the film cuts a path through the fog.’