When the Barcelona journalist Carmina Balaguer she left Buenos Aires to take refuge in the hypoxic heights of the Humahuaca she, she did it she in search of silence. However, what she found were words –sacred words, linked to the land and the Andean cosmovision– and a story that pushed her to the limit, both physically and emotionally , sparking a revolution in her life that sent her back to her roots.
That story is the one that has just been released in documentary film format with the work the andean screen, a journey on foot at 4200 meters high along bridle paths following in the footsteps of a teacher who set out to take the cinema to the most isolated school in the province of Jujuy.
WALKING ON DREAMS
As chance would have it, as soon as she set foot on her new land, Carmina Balaguer learned about the project that was going to revolutionize her life. A few days ago she had moved from Buenos Aires, where she had lived for six years, to the northern limit of Argentina, in the Quebrada de Humahuaca . Still half a foot away from her move, her work as a journalist took her to the city of San Salvador de Jujuy, where she was going to cover the International Film Festival of the Heights.
Carmina Balaguer takes us on a journey to the heights of the Quebrada de Humahuaca.
Among the multiple attendees to the Festival were the members of the Mobile Cinema team , a program financed by the Ministry of Culture of Jujuy whose mission is bring cinema closer to rural schools in the province . As soon as she exchanged three words with her coordinator, Asunción Rodríguez, Carmina knew that there was a story to tell.
“I felt a lot of connection with Asunción –explains Carmina to Traveler.es–. I started traveling with them, more and more distant towns , up to eight hours by truck in the high desert”. During these trips, the members of Cine Móvil told him about some valleys that open up on the side of the Quebrada de Humahuaca, where there are seven isolated schools among which one had just received a gravel road.
These schools perform axis for the Kolla communities in the area -whose houses are scattered several hours' walk away- and, in them, the children spend twenty days a month living with teachers, cleaners, toilets and other school staff.
It was on one of those trips that the idea for the documentary germinated: “the members of Cine Móvil began to joke with how good it would be to bring cinema to these schools even though you have to cross mountains on foot. So I told them: ‘If you do it, I will explain it with a film’ . This story could not be told any other way.
A journey on foot at 4200 meters high.
At that time Carmina ignored him but she had just given her first step towards that return to the roots which would take place definitively months later, after the recording of the project. Carmina's professional origins had been linked to the audiovisual world , in which she had worked for eight years coordinating street castings on the ground and doing production work.
Her first personal mutation was experienced when she switched to journalism, to "the written word , because she wanted to tell stories, she wanted to write." Finding this story, audiovisual language came back to life like a downpour
Launched the órdago, there was no turning back. The members of the Cine Móvil team accepted the bet and Carmina immediately got to work: time was a key factor . “In these places where the geology and the landscape dominate so much, there are things that you have to decide based on it. I arrived in September and it was not until December that I found all the elements to convince myself that there was a story there and that the trip had to be done before May , due to the arrival of the snows”.
One of those elements was the appearance of the protagonist of the story: Silvina Velázquez, the director of one of the high valley schools . “I knew that I had to find another character to make my idea work, to drive the story and take us to deeper places. The documentary is much more than the Mobile Cinema reaching remote places, my real objective is open the door to the Andean world for the viewer, explain their worldview in places where they do not know , because we can learn a lot from it”.
"My real goal is to open the door to the Andean world for the viewer."
As Carmina tells it, during the production stage he spoke with different school principals. “I met Silvina a couple of times. The second talk we had was very deep and that's where I realized I was the character in the story . At that time, she had fulfilled her mission: that a road came to that place . She now she wanted to increase the difficulty and take on the most isolated school of all. That surprised me a lot, because she has been walking to work for fifteen years. She walks mountains during exhausting days through the Andean landscapes”.
To walk . This verb, which she shares with Carmina much more than the letters of her name, is one of the key points that she sought to capture in her work: “ walking is a symbol of Andean culture . It's everything; is to go to the end, whatever it takes, is get in touch with the earth, feel it and respect it as one more element of your life. The Andean culture is a culture of work, of effort, of love for the land . There, if you don't walk, you don't do anything. Walking is the thing to do; it is the life that touches”.
From the European perspective, walking is usually an action linked to leisure or escape from the monster of everyday life , something inherited from nineteenth-century romanticism, where travelers and walkers wandered through nature (and also cities) in search of beautiful stimuli where they could escape from the world or seek creative inspiration. In the Andean communities, walking turns people into one more part of the ground they walk on . They do not walk to escape, but to connect with life.
Once their protagonist was found, Silvina, Asunción and Carmina began all the preparations, passing through phases as vital as the ask permission from the communities and the land itself that they were going to travel. Everything had to be tied down because “It was such a complicated trip that it allowed only one opportunity” . And Carmina was not exaggerating:
A trip, not only to the heights, but also inside.
“It was a very long, very hard journey” , she recognizes her. “ It took us about twenty hours to complete it , going through different microclimates: cold, drizzle, high altitude heat…; and many changes in altitude: we walked between 3,000 and 3,500 meters, passing over 4,200 meters at the highest point. That harshness has not been fully conveyed in the documentary, because there were times when we were so, so bad that we couldn't film”.
However, despite the difficulties, for Carmina, the nine days she spent at school sleeping with the rest of the group were “A trip to a timeless place where each one of us was moved by something”.
During her stay, Carmina tried to record everything, from the atmospheric nuances to the looks and points of view of the teacher, the members of the mobile cinema and the students. All this, the Barcelonan was not able to assimilate until her return to the Quebrada, even after the viewing stage of the 35 hours of material that she brought from the high valleys.
It was then, at that moment, after the viewing that took place during the Jujuy winter, when Carmina erupted: “ That's when I met Carmina del Mar and decided to go back . I saw the roots of the Andean world so deep that it was impossible not to ask myself what my roots were: the sea. There is no water there, there is no sea”.
'Going far is coming back very close', reads the subtitle of Carmina's film.
To go far is to come back very close, reads the subtitle of Carmina's film . And that is what, as the traveler says, defines very well all the characters in the film and the members of the team. “When we came back, we all made changes in our lives. My great personal change is that I returned to my land . Sometimes you have to go very far to find something that is already very close, that is within you, at your disposal.
Carmina had to go to the dizzying heights of Argentina to rediscover his own childhood , the one in the Catalan Pyrenees where she grew up as a child and where she learned to love the mountain thanks to his family , when "you could still camp and it was not prohibited".
In her book On Walking on Ice, Werner Herzog wrote that "wisdom comes through the soles of the feet" . That wisdom is what has brought Carmina back to Spain, where she is going to start the second part of her Jujuy journey with the presentation of the andean screen by different festivals of the Spanish territory.
His ultimate big goal of hers? Return to Jujuy to take the cinema back to the high valleys , this time with the spectators as protagonists.