How to Suture the Soil?

The flow of migration from South to North America is not only a recent phenomenon. In the early 1980s, for example, Ecuadorians fled their country from the war with Peru, or escaped the violence in the border region by heading to the north of the country. Among them were the family of Wil Paucar Calle.

Now, 40 years later, he describes in a letter to his mother how he retraced the route she took from Loja to Quito. He captures the landscape mainly in nocturnal shots—many of which are so unsteady that all we see are nightmarish stripes—and describes the places where he stops and rests. He projects photographs from the family album onto peeling walls, clothes hanging on the line, the leaves of dust-covered shrubs, and dirt roads cracked by the sun.

Filming is Calle’s way of getting closer to his mother and the place she always talked about; a way of stitching the mental wound. Memory, dream, and self-therapy come together in a poetic attempt to reach back into a world that no longer exists. It lives on only in the family history of which Calle is an intrinsic part.