GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL 2020 - Valley of Souls
GLASGOW FILM FESTIVAL 2020
Historians refer to the period of time spanning between the end of World War II and the present as the ‘long peace’, as though to emphasize the fact it is by far the longest time in recorded history without a military conflict between the world’s major powers. This doesn’t mean that the victory of the Allies over Nazi Germany and Imperial Japan had precipitated a change in humans as a whole; far from it. While the world’s foremost empires were busy calcifying a nuclear stalemate and occasionally venting through localized wars in Korea or Vietnam, the very sentiments which had brought about The Holocaust – societal divisions, cultural polarization and the us-versus-them-ism in politics – have continued unabated and manifested themselves in such places as Northern Ireland, Indonesia, Rwanda, Bosnia, Cambodia, or Kosovo.
Colombia is also a country with a troubled recent history involving a decades-spanning bloody civil war that only recently has come to an end. Written and directed by Nicolás Rincón Gille in his feature debut, Valley of souls is an attempt to wrestle with Colombia’s past and perhaps raise awareness of a brutal fratricidal conflict that saw hundreds of thousands of people killed and millions displaced. Interestingly, the film’s aspiration isn’t to inform or educate through recounting the facts of the subject matter, but to take the viewer on an expedition to the grinding interface between the gears of history where countless masses had been caught, never to be seen again. In many ways it exhibits marked symmetry with László Nemes’s Son of Saul, which also opted to teach its audiences about The Holocaust in a completely experiential way. In fact, Valley of souls does it using a similar narrative template which involves a father embarking on a solitary journey to locate the bodies of his two sons murdered by far-right paramilitaries of AUC and to give them a proper burial.
As this odyssey of immeasurable grief patiently unfolds in the foreground, the filmmaker paints the backdrop of the story with his own stinging commentary about the pointlessness of the Colombian war and the immense toll it took in vast swathes on the country’s population. Although he never resorts to depicting violence, he chooses to unsettle the viewer by confronting them with its aftermath in a frighteningly stoic and unrelenting manner, which bears similarities to how Francis Ford Coppola smuggled the horrors of The Vietnam War into the background of Apocalypse now, or how Embrace of the serpent handled the respective legacy of parasitic colonialism in South America. It is as though Gille wanted to permeate into the audience’s imagination and have them fill in the gruesome detail of mass executions, dismemberments, rapes and torture while he continued telling his story. In consequence, the movie successfully retains its localized focus, keeps the viewer personally invested in the heart-rending personal tragedy unfolding on the screen, and only hints at the big picture of the civil war without ever addressing it head-on.
Using a combination of extremely long takes, deliberately slow pacing of the narrative and a complete lack of music as an accompaniment to the film’s subject matter, Valley of souls conjures a rather unique atmosphere, which somehow marries two seemingly immiscible notions – an ever-present threat posed by roaming death squads and a certain aura of serenity given off by the protagonist’s stalwart religious conviction driving his actions. This conflict of sorts bolster’s the narrative and gives it a secondary layer of interpretation wherein the protagonist’s journey is a metaphorical illustration of a conflict of values between fundamental religiosity and a dehumanizing lust for power. Given how the story eventually resolves in an utterly thought-provoking, exhilarating and unforgettable manner, this metaphorical filter becomes even more interesting to analyse the movie with, as it briefly overshadows its political aspirations and gives the narrative yet another dimension.
Thus, it is appropriate to see Valley of souls as a thematic double helix that brings together and binds a reckoning with the tragedy of the war in Colombia and a soulful exploration of paternal grief. It is a powerful examination of suffering and the role of spirituality in processing pain that also succeeds in bringing much needed attention to a chapter in contemporary history that seems to have evaporated from the world’s collective consciousness. Valley of souls is a harrowing and masterful debut, beautifully shot and composed with calculated restraint characteristic of a mature filmmaker.
