Lapü
Indigenous Peoples
•
1h 15m
Directed by Juan Pablo Polanco, César Alejandro Jaimes • Documentary • 2019 • 75 minutes
On a windy night in the Colombian desert, a young Wayúu woman named Doris sleeps in her hammock and has a dream that she reunites with a deceased cousin. When she awakens and shares the encounter with her grandmother, they agree that her vision suggests the beginning of an ancient ritual, one central to their culture’s relationship with death, dreams, and memory. According to custom, Doris must travel to her cousin’s grave and exhume the body from its coffin. Only after she cleanses her cousin’s bones will the physical and spiritual barriers of death crumble. Lapü documents Doris’s journey into the realm of death, layering her ritual with hypnotic visual and sonic abstraction. Mirroring the Wayúu belief that the deceased coexist with the living, filmmakers Juan Pablo Polanco and César Alejandro Jaimes resurrect the world of the dead so that it lives side by side with Doris as she embarks on her “second burial.” The result is a haunting, mysterious vision that blurs Western concepts of loss and time and flips the conventional approach to documentary storytelling on its head.
"[A] dreamy quasi-doc that captures the atmosphere of a rite of passage rather than explaining what's going on." —The Hollywood Reporter
Up Next in Indigenous Peoples
-
Last Cab to Darwin
Directed by Jeremy Sims • Drama • With Michael Caton, Jacki Weaver, Ningali Lawford-Wolf, Emma Hamilton, Mark Coles Smith • 2014 • 123 minutes
Rex is a cab driver who has never left the mining town of Broken Hill in his life. When he discovers he doesn’t have long to live, he decides to drive t...
-
A Narmada Diary
Directed by Anand Patwardhan, Simantini Dhuru • Documentary • 1995 • 57 minutes
The Sardar Sarover Dam in western India, lynch-pin of a mammoth development project on the river Narmada’s banks, has been criticized as uneconomical and unjust. It will benefit urban India at a cost borne by the rur...
-
Dam/Age
Directed by Aradhana Seth • Documentary • 2002 • 50 minutes
"I suddenly realized… I command the space to raise a dissenting voice, and if I don't do it, it's as political an act as doing it… to stay quiet is as political an act as speaking out."- Arundhati Roy, Author of Booker Prize Winner The ...
