A man is sitting opposite a laptop. Then a voice comes up out of the dark depths
of the tropical night that the image suddenly plunges us into: ‘Once upon a time…’
The man listening is Gustavo Salvatierra, who has chosen to return to his country
Sipo’hi, in Chaco, a region in the far northern corner of Argentina, amongst the Wichi
and Toba Indians. His aim is to record the mythical stories that are passed down
orally from generation to generation. This provides the framework for the project:
to make us listen today to these fragile, strange, droll legends and stop them from
being erased by the advent of local radio.
Sipo’hi pursues an enterprise of ‘ethnopoetry’, which is both rigorous and breaks
the rules of science, as first demonstrated by Las pistas (which won the First Film
Prize at FID2010). Sebastian Lingiardi turns his attention to these places once again.
The spoken word, voices, gestures that take hold of this land, with its villages,
forests, river and omnipresent nature, draw us into it: it has been crossed on foot,
with a rhythm imposing a certain slowness, which lends itself to capturing sounds
and breathing. The calm of the waterway, the serenity of these places are haunted
by beautiful, tranquil voice overs telling us stories of the fox, the tiger, the fishes and
the gods communing with humans. There is an empirical necessity to make the
imagination resonate using the players and their guardians, a way of letting them
find themselves, not as the owners of their landscape but as its faces and voices.
(NF)