Mauricio Freyre
Peru, Spain, 2025, Color, 76’
World Premiere at FIDMarseille
Estados Generales opens with a sensual kiss exchanged in the midst of lush vegetation in Madrid’s Botanical Garden. Besides plants and trees from Europe, America and the Pacific, the garden also holds archives of scientific expeditions to former colonies, drawings and herbariums, some of them containing unidentified and uncatalogued specimens, gathered in a mysterious room in the shade of History. This is where Mauricio Freyre chooses a sample of seeds to imagine their journey in reverse, from the colonizing to the colonized country. While during the day, the life of the Garden quietly goes on, at night, two archivists secretly prepare the return trip. Divided into several envelopes, the seeds embark for another continent. Until then fixed, the camera now follows the movement of the waves in the depths of the night, before resting on a beach in Chincha valley, Peru. There, a young woman opens her mail. A guided tour in a museum reminds us of the atrocities of slavery. Then, we come face to face with a nature dominated by man. From pesticide fumigations along clementine fields to the processing of the fruits in a factory in accordance with norms imposed by giant corporations, it appears that the colonial order lives on through capitalism. But even though the film makes this sad observation, it also offers a counter-narrative, at the opposite end of hegemony, that challenges the order of things. Such is the case with the spectral presence, embodied by a mutating subjective camera, that in turn disturbs perception. If night is the place where anything is possible, it is in that moment, at the break of dawn, that the conspiratorial hands of two kids plant one of the seeds that have just come back in the middle of a cornfield. With this tiny gesture, they repair a little of the colonial dispossession and offer the beginning of an answer to the question asked by two botanists on the other continent—can a hundred-year-old seed still germinate?
Louise Martin Papasian