Carelia, internacional con monumento

Karelia is a region in northeastern Europe that straddles the border between Russia and Finland, Sweden and the Soviet Union have held sway over it too. It has seen massacres both centuries-old and far closer to living memory, it’s a landscape of islands, lakes, and canals, pine forests and pastures, pale green in the summer sun. All this and much more emerges from Andrés Duque’s film, but hardly as expected. The carefree time spent with a historian and his family at their home in the forest is at the heart of his documentary, which starts from the everyday and moves outwards from there. Impression after impression are gently pasted together into a portrait guided as much by observation as it is by sensation and reverie; such a shifting place requires an equally shifting approach. There are poems, paper aeroplanes, and the political speeches that issue forth from the cassette player, drone music and bursts of Sibelius, insects, old maps, warped wood, and shimmering rock, ships that seem to float over the land, spinning camera movements. And a photo is taken of the family, like the photos hanging in the trees: a monument can be erected anywhere and by anyone, take any sort of form. (James Lattimer)