Estados generales

In his inventive debut film, Mauricio Freyre intertwines an imaginary journey home with conversations with archive experts from the botanical garden in Madrid. The subject here is seeds—more specifically, seeds taken from former Spanish colonies. Some of them can no longer be identified, but as state property the seeds cannot be discarded. They end up being stored in room S.59, in possibly original 18th- and 19th-century crates marked Frutos sin nombres (“Unnamed fruits”).

In the first half of Estados Generales, Freyre’s 16mm camera explores this archive in tightly framed shots, accompanied by a carefully crafted, minimalist sound design. Then we arrive across the ocean in Chincha Valley, Peru, where Freyre imagines a few seeds returning from Spain to their place of origin.

But this homecoming is not a return to paradise. While nocturnal scenes seem to be captured by the gaze of a wandering ghost, we experience how colonialism continues in South America through a form of capitalism that is just as destructive.