About seven minutes into Ana Bravo-Perez’s discomforting new 21-minute documentary short, Mother Earth’s Inner Organs, there is a static shot of a train passing. Everything that has preceded this shot has been grainy, febrile, and ominous – stories of strange-smelling air in the Netherlands and abstract footage that evokes the tearing of the earth to reveal the molten core of the planet below. However, after an intertitle that introduces the Wayuu region in northern Colombia, there follows an almost five-minute scene of this train passing. The shot takes up nearly a quarter of the film’s total length. The train is carrying coal, being transported to the coast before travelling on to Europe, and in maintaining her unflinching gaze upon it, the enormity of what Bravo-Perez is presenting here is made startlingly clear.
The scale of the extraction operation is made evident elsewhere – an interactive map teems with red dots that signify cargo ships, aerial shots hover above heaps of slag, and local women are interviewed and discuss the impact of mining on communities – but this shot of the train symbolises everything perfectly. It’s about the duration, about various moments throughout the shot that the mind wonders when the train will finish passing, and yet it goes on and on.
Bravo-Perez combines these more straightforward documentary elements with a number of more experimental impulses. In the opening section, grainy imagery shows smoke fumes billowing into the atmosphere. Discordant, reverberating music and the dim, grainy footage creates a sense of unease and foreboding. When the image starts to skip and shake, the sound becomes more astringent, like electricity – like radiation. The earth is sick and, in a later moment, is given voice itself, through on-screen text that accompanies the coal across the ocean. Other forces are also given a voice, the women speak of spirits that flee the mines and take refuge in local people, like Sophia Al-Maria’s similarly-themed 2017 piece about the Wayuu, The Magical State. As the coal creates black mountains in Colombia and the Netherlands, the people, the demons, and the very earth seem to cry out in sickness and pain.
Director: Ana Bravo-Perez
Producers: Joram Kraaijeveld, Ana Bravo-Perez
Cinematography: Daniel Donato
Editing Lucas Camargo de Barros, Ana Bravo-Perez
Sound: Carlos Segovia
Sound Design: Juan Orozco
Production company: Urkunina Films (Colombia)
Venue: International Documentary Film Festival Amsterdam (Best of Fests)
In English, Spanish, Dutch
21 minutes
