One, two, three – freeze ! While men burn the hay in the field, children stand frozen in the landscape. The bang of a bullet reverberates. A woman’s face appears in the blue sky. A child is laying on the ground. This is how Lumbre, opens – a tragedy from which a polyphony unfolds, in four movements. Modelled on a musical fugue, the first part of the piece – an accidental death – holds the force of the work’s structure which gathers steam as it unravels, images of concentric circles herald each fragment. In the end, like a typographer, Santiago Mohar Volkow creates the meticulous sets of his film from the word go. Then, without the clutter of words he finds the melody of this essay on grief, in an elliptical edit, like a puzzle of mirrors and fragments. This barely sketched-out drama gives rise to encounters: between a man and a young woman at the child’s funeral; music – the film’s soundtrack which we see being composed in the intimacy of the studio; images. Like a portrait artist, Santiago Mohar Volkow sets a sublime collection of grieving faces to 35mm, including that of the young woman wearing a brown headscarf who, between two glances at the man who becomes her lover, fixes her gaze of rare beauty at the camera. Right in the middle of this variation is the intrusion of archive images of families posing in front of children’s corpses, followed by a documentary sequence at the crematorium which perforates the fiction and brings the dead back to their familiar rituals. Fire, the leitmotif of the film, resurges in waves – around a love scene, in the sizzle of a cigarette – serving as a transitional image. Lighthouses pierce the dark night sky, as a cortege of bicycles animates the final movement of the fugue. Lumbre: or the possibility of life after death.

(Louise Martin-Papasian)