Carropasajero – Films – Visions du Réel

Juan Pablo Polanco Carranza & Cesar Alejandro Jaimes
Colombia, Germany | 2024 | 103 min
World premiere
Language : Spanish
Subtitles : English, French

Aboard a rickety bus, indigenous men and women of the Wayúu community talk about their wounds. They are travelling on the fringes of Colombia and Venezuela, a territory haunted by its colonial past. The camera follows their faces, then loses itself in the immensity of the horizon. A sensory, dreamlike road trip in which every boundary is blurred – geographical, temporal, spiritual.

Somewhere in the desert between Colombia and Venezuela, an old pick-up truck is transporting a group of passengers of all ages, in a trance between sleep and wakefulness. Punctuated by bumps in the road, the camera carefully makes its way around the faces. Words are spoken, in Spanish and particularly in Wayúu, the language spoken by the indigenous people of the same name, who inhabit this region of La Guajira. A desert halo pervades the image and, with it, the sense that we are suspended in limbo – evoking the spiritual content of these accounts, which deal explicitly with death, and more implicitly with the colonial violence and forced exiles of the 19th century. Capturing the lights of both night and day, the cinematography focuses on the horizontal plane, trusting in the infinite skies to create space. By way of contrast, details are isolated, and fragments underlined. A ray of sunlight melts into a palm, among the lines of the hand. Is the camera an ethnographer or a shaman? Can it see spirits? We feel a thrilling sense of privilege as we listen to these souls speak.
Cloé Tralci

Cesar Alejandro Jaimes
Carropasajero, 2024
Lapü, 2019
Portete, 2004

Juan Pablo Polanco Carranza
Carropasajero, 2024
Lapü, 2019
A la deriva, 2018
Portete, 2004