A young man has left his mother and his home to try to make money in the forest.
Is he liberated from his childhood life?
Has he forfeited his liberty by becoming a manual laborer, cutting trees in the forest from morning til night?
Or perhaps the title "La Libertad" does not refer to the young man at all?
I think that the title refers to the wild, unexpected, excitingly disruptive 60 seconds in the middle of the film when the camera operator takes a walk. His subject has gone inside the tent to rest during his mid-day break. Without a subject, the camera is liberated and becomes a character in the movie, walking briskly through the lush foliage, looking about freely. After that moment, the remainder of the movie has an invisible main character: the camera. The movie changes from being a "documentary" to being a film about the viewer's awareness of the camera in any movie making endeavor. -dp
From the web site: Lincoln Film Society, Art of the Real series, 2014
LA LIBERTAD
LISANDRO ALONSO, 2001
ARGENTINA | FORMAT: 35MM | 73 MINUTES
Alonso’s landmark feature debut, based on months of closely observing its subject’s routines, follows a day in the life of Misael, a young woodcutter in the Argentinean pampas. Using long takes that are at once uninflected and hyper-attentive, La Libertad chronicles the stark facts and repetitive actions of Misael’s largely solitary existence: he searches for trees and chops wood, pauses to defecate or eat, prepares and transports the logs for sale, returns to his camp to build a fire and cook his dinner. The title crystallizes a question about this man’s life: is the cyclical daily grind a burden or a kind of freedom? Or does the title refer to Alonso’s conception of an anti-dramatic, materialist cinema, absolutely in-the-moment and liberated from the traditional confines of fiction and documentary? “An account of everyday work that transforms the banal into poetry, maybe even myth,” James Quandt wrote of La Libertad, named one of the top 10 films of the past decade in Cinema Scope magazine. Print courtesy of the Harvard Film Archive.
