A visual and emotional experience that won’t let anyone indifferent
By Alberto Sclaverano
After being first screened in January at the 2022 Sundance Film Festival, and then released in France during the spring of the same year, Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s debut film Utama received widespread critical acclaim. A co-production between France, the director’s native country Bolivia, and Uruguay, the movie is a powerful tale about life and death, and the connection that can exist between men and nature.
The story takes place in Altiplano, in the Bolivian Andes, in an area in which drought has become a severe plague, making the life conditions of poor farmers even harsher. The main character is Virginio, who lives alongside his wife Sisa in a small, poor house in the Altiplano and grazes the llamas (the local domesticated camelid). He is sick due to a respiratory illness, and in his heart, he knows to be bound to die. He accepts his fate, relying more on traditional indigenous spirituality than modern medicine. His grandson Clever comes to visit him from the city and tries to convince Virginio to see a doctor. But he refuses and peacefully follows his destiny.
There are two main themes in this beautiful, sad, movie that sometimes almost seems like a poem told through images instead of verses. The first one is the contrast between the modern world, barely visible, confined to a scene in which a doctor called by Clever visits Virginio and tries to convince him to come back with him to the city’s hospital.
The other dimension is the one in which Virginio and his wife live. A time outside time, in which nature is still “enchanted” and spirits are real. Even the language seems to divide the two worlds. Clever speaks Spanish, the language of the “state”, his grandparents talk in the old Quechua’s language when they are alone.
Utama is not a eulogy of Virginio’s world. It acknowledges the harshness and cruelty of that kind of life. Yet at the same time, the movie seems to suggest that the old couple has a deeper connection to nature than any person from the so-called civilized world.
The second theme concerns climate change. The deterioration of soil due to drought is a recurrent element in the film. Virginio looks at the sky praying desperately for the rain. He and other poor farmers even make traditional indigenous rituals to invoke the rain. The movie wants to denounce how the “outside” world has just brought more misery to people who already lived a hard life. Virginio, his neighbors, and their ancestors lived and suffered with dignity through their difficult existences for hundreds of years. But now, the climate crisis and the consequences of climate change threaten them on a scale never seen before.
Utama takes the spectator to a place of the world that almost seems unreal, especially when the movie is seen by a modern Western audience. But alongside showing us a completely different reality, such as one of the poorest Bolivian farmers, it makes a clear denounce and warns on the damage that the climate crisis, mainly generated by the most advanced countries, is causing everywhere, even in the farthest places of the Earth. Shot beautifully, with very effective cinematography, this movie will affect viewers long after they have seen it, gifting us with images of beauty and sadness, that are incredibly hard to remember.
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