Like everything in this extraordinary film, it is absolutely in the here and now, and everywhere else at the same time. It is stuck deliberately in the lit- eral, visceral lives of almost destitute, hard- scrabble lives and also constantly, in images, in testimony and in allusion, about our fragil- ity in a world we barely scrape. Eldorado XXI is an extraordinary film set in an almost unimaginably hard place, in the earth itself, 15,000 feet above sea level. It is a privilege to see something of this world, so carefully and empathetically brought to the screen.

What can five shots hold? Two are enough to capture a landscape, an expanse of rock, ice, cloud, and snow so vast it feels like the frame can hardly contain it, like the lake, mountains, and sky stretch on forever. Everything appears frozen, immobile, devoid of life, it’s only when a bird flies overhead and the wind moves through the blackened reeds that you can even tell it’s not a photograph. There’s no sign of where the voice might be coming from, it can only have emerged from beneath the tundra, carried and amplified by the wind. It sings of a sorrow as immeasurable as the land, of endurance, of endless exertion and the endless drinking needed to assuage it, of a life spent between Lunar de Oro, La Rinconada, and pallaquear. […] What is the sum of three parts? The ex- perience of a place and the maxims used to document it: there are things you can quantify and others you cannot; only a complex struc- ture can do justice to a complex subject; how you see a place at the beginning is never how you see it in the end.

Shortly after the credits, the biggest marvel of all: another long take (long and then longer and then longer still)—one is put in mind of those amazing careering single-takes at the outsets of Scorsese’s movies or the endlessly roving vantage in Sokurov’s Russian Ark, except that in this instance (an audacious Copernican flip!) the camera doesn’t move at all, peering down instead from on high as Lamas holds her unblinking gaze for close to an hour, while dozens and then hundreds (and presently thousands?) of miners, groaning under the weight of their burdens, trudge by in squeezed files, some heading up and others down the narrow pitched mountain path, the scene starting out in thin crepuscule but persisting into pitch black (by the end all we see are the crisscrossing beams of the workers’ hardhat headlamps), the soundtrack consisting of the crunch of their boots played off against stray wisps of audio testimony and wafting passages of radio banter. A human antfile. A Dantesque Escherscape: Möbian Sisyphi. [...] Someplace we will in fact likely never go, though on second thought, as we emerge from the trance in which Lamas has had us entrammelled all this time, and gaze, say, down upon the rings on our fingers or the baubles hanging from our ears or necks, a place whose sordid travails actually implicate us all, and profoundly so. And what are we to make of that?

There is no question that Eldorado XXI is a critical intervention, a piece of protest cinema of sorts. Although I think this can be read rather directly off the surface of the film, it is all that much clearer when considered in light of Lamas’ broader cinematic practice. Her earlier work has engaged with problems of global displacement and the encroachment of neoliberal capital into all aspects of life. Prior to Eldorado XXI, Lamas’ best-known work on the festival circuit was her previous feature, No Man’s Land (2012), a 72-minute film that consists almost entirely of a performative “interview” with Paulo, an international mercenary who is discussing his role in international terrorism and the destabilization of various governments and anti-colonial movements. To hear Paolo tell it, he is the Devil for whom Mick Jagger asks us to find sympathy: Angola, Mozambique, Portugal, and Spain—he was there. She is helping to create a post-liberal progressive cinema.

The film is magnificent. The long fixed shot on the busy trail en la Compuerta (I know that steep trail, I think) as it gets dark for the entire first half of the film, with all those interviews running, is extremely bold, and so so effective. The hard life of the place is calmly, perfectly represented by the ceaseless foot traffic, and the voices of the people, from las pallaqueras to el brujo to the testimonies of poverty to the radio DJs - it’s all there. And then the camera starts moving around, and you find so much - for me, it was very moving to see, virtually every shot, every scene. The painful religiosity, the painful politics, the faces, my god.