The film relates a journey on the footsteps of an exile: not really that of Chilean poet Francisco Contreras, who lived in Paris at the turn of the 20th century, but rather that of his young French wife, Andrea, who made the trip backwards after the poet passed away, and spent the rest of her life in Chile. Although the film is an implicit portrait of Francisco Contreras, a poet once forgotten in his own country, it is Andrea’s ghost that seems to be guiding the eponymous character, a young photographer who prepares a film about the gathering of the two exiled lovers’ ashes. With great freedom, without getting mixed up with expected itineraries, and always confronting fiction and reality, the film slowly weaves a framework of mysterious connections between Ana and Andrea. Pamela Varela imperceptibly disturbs her character’s bearings, and therefore our own. Elliptical, always jumping from one place to another, and confronting various categories of images without ever indulging in an easy “film inside the film” device, the film’s journey is anything but linear, it changes with the people met along the way, and keeps opening new leads. Yet, as we follow each and every step of Ana’s journey, something obvious appears and guides her, from the reddening landscapes of Dordogne to the slopes of the Andes: a return to homeland. This delicate nostalgia gives the film its poetic dimension. (CG)
Pamela Varela