La libertad

Misael is a woodcutter working alone in a forest in Argentina. The film covers one of his days: he wakes, cooks, cuts trees, rests, loads the wood onto a truck, drives to a town and sells it, buys supplies, comes back, cooks and sleeps. There is almost no speech; apart from a few sentences the sound is the sound of the forest. Lisandro Alonso writes and directs. Misael Saavedra plays the part; he really is a woodcutter and is doing his own work. It is the director's first film and among the sharpest examples of the new Argentine cinema. The form rests on the long take. Every stage of the work is shown without cutting: felling a tree, stripping the branches, carrying the wood. The narrative speeds nothing up. The line between fiction and documentary is deliberately unclear. The scenes are arranged and what happens is real; Saavedra is not acting, he is working. The idea is in the title: this man is bound to nobody and nobody interferes with him, and the film leaves the question of how much freedom that is unasked. It is short, about seventy three minutes. Who it is for: viewers who like slow cinema and minimal form. Who it is not for: there is no event, no dialogue and no narrative, and the film offers no comment.