The River Escapes

Experimental video by Eduardo Makoszay, Turning Torso & Esstro9

The remembrance of a recurrence resonates in the alps, the humans that live there glance at it in dreams. With the camera we tried to pursue its melody up to the center of the mountain which erupted us into the glaciar as if we were gold. We imagined re-weaving the heartbeats with the narrative inscribed unto the alpine land.

What starts out as a calm, observational record from an excursion boat filled with Taiwanese tourists admiring a glacier, soon turns into a frenzied – in places almost hallucinogenic – series of bizarre events after a black spot appears in the sky. Shots of the tourists alternate with views of horses grazing in a snowy landscape, a couple in a hotel room, and a group of young people digging film strips out of a garbage can. From the start, the viewer searches for the key to this random sequence of wordless scenes, trying to keep pace with the rapid, sometimes even stroboscopic montage of juxtaposed shots, which is slowed down with contemplative views of the monstrous glacier.

During the winter solstice, a group of modern Mexicans gather to observe the sun emerging from the peak of the Popocatépetl. This cosmogeographic event served as a marker in the horizon calendar, an ancient technology to keep track of time.

The film observes a navigation through the 30 hours that followed the earthquake of September 19, 2017 in Mexico City. It begins on Escocia Street in the downtown area and ends in the town of San Gregorio, Xochimilco in the south of the city. The camera oscillates its point of view between individual and collective experiences.