The Valley of Souls
(Tantas Almas)

Nine years after Los Abrazos del rio, awarded the Montgolfière d’or at the 2010 Festival des 3 Continents, Nicolás Rincón Gille returns to the Bolivar region and the banks of the river Magdalena, building a bridge between his documentaries and this first feature. Here, another fisherman, José, each day defies the seemingly peaceful currents that we know to be turbulent. You can no more tame the humours of the river’s flow than you can foresee the arbitrary and lethal violence of the ultra-right paramilitary organisation, AUC, which long held sway in the region on the pretext of eliminating the FARC and ELN. As the heart of this world and successively nourishing and tragic, the Magdalena of the film is a reality at the same time tangible and mythological, a sort of confluence of the Styx and the Lethe. When José discovers the body of one of his missing sons, he steps up his efforts to find the second, transforming his search into a fight against oblivion and the film into an unadorned tribute to the civil victims of the crimes committed by the auxiliary and illegal forces of the Colombian army. JB