Director´s Letter

 

 

In 1995 I was touring around the rivers and mangles surrounding the town of San Lorenzo, Borbón and Limones on the exuberant border between Ecuador and Colombia. I was taking notes for a story I wanted film in that region and things developed in such a way that some time later I established a relationships and moved in with an Afro family that lived on the outskirts of San Lorenzo.

 

I started to internalize their gestures, their rituals, their music and dance. This helped me understand the intimate world of a culture which, at that moment, was distant for me. I started to absorb stories, landscapes, sounds and colors, sharing the dreams and joys of these people. I could also observe how devastating the advancing of "civilization" could be.  The irruption of enterprises was grinding not only the land but also the dream of meeting with ones ancestors.

 

Conscious of my status as a foreigner, I decided to construct a fiction film which would integrate my own vision with the reality of this community´s ancestral values which were not mine, but with which I feel ancestrally linked to.

 

In this frontier where anything can happen, Adelaida and Pae Gamboa´s story leads us to acknowledge the value of ourselves in others and the importance of using the coincidences in human nature as a tool for tolerance and coexistence between diversities.