Meditation, 2023

The landforms emerge after the drought. A space of stillness and silence becomes a place of observation. The geography is gradually internalised. The landscape ceases to be something to watch and instead becomes a form of meditation.

Director’s statement

I came upon the village of Galizuela in Extremadura by chance and immediately fell in love with it. Every dawn, I would awake to the birdsong and run to the window to see the day awaiting me so I could choose my route. I felt magnetic attraction to that almost lunar landscape with the reservoir at just 13% of its capacity. All I wanted to do was walk around, listen to it, film it and contemplate it from different perspectives. Even if it was rainy, cold or foggy, each day was a new light and colour display.

Through active contemplation, the landscape gradually became something abstract, and my own involuntary mental sounds and noises bloomed. Trying to recreate and approximate that mental state with sound design was a real challenge.

Prior to shooting, the conversations on the finiteness of life with Elizabeth Blackburn, a Nobel Prize winner in physiology, helped me to reconsider the image of the vultures I had filmed in my first feature film El silencio que queda (The Silence that Remains) and see them more calmly with the intention of giving them a place more suited to the cycles of nature, life and death that have always interested me.

Press kit

Download (PDF)