A Thousand Years Ago

A retrieved picture of a window elicits memories and the impulse to recreate a lost site. By this same window, an eight year old child feels the cold air on his face and imagines the future.

A Venezuelan city is emptying. A labor less priest struggles with a sonic sleep disorder while trying to safe-keep his meek buffalo from being taken. As the intentions of the remaining ones become more desperate, the priest’s malaise becomes more alive.

I travel through a specific landscape, Southern California, where memories of my home country, Venezuela, come to life. Uncannily, the journeys of my adulthood speak of the ones from my early years. Certain geographical similarities provide links to remembrances of family, loss, fear and coping. And at the heart of it, my parents, who recall their youth and the passions of their generation.

Santiago, a young filmmaker, wanders around Caracas lost in a romantic reverie, longing for his girlfriend Carmela, who has left Venezuela. In this autobiographical portrait, Santiago Martín constructs a charming hybrid narrative between film shoots, friends and memories, an atmosphere of words and spaces evoking moments lived.

The moon watches us as we sleep and tunes into an ominous dream inhabited by red-winged blackbirds, feared for their aggressiveness. In this illusory urban landscape, the natural order seems irrational and hostile. However, as the chirping of the birds warns us, perhaps it is the dream of cities that is out of sync with its surroundings. In the empty spiral between moonrise and dawn, the film examines contingent relationships with natural and urban landscapes in an era of perpetual crisis.