30. Film Festival della Lessinia
Bosco Chiesanuova (Italia)
23 August - 1 September 2024

Italian premiere

In the desert of La Guajira, in Colombia, the Wayuu have lived for millennia. Their traditional rituals mark time and define blood relations. Doris, a young Wayuu, dreams of being reunited with her long-dead cousin. While sleeping in a hammock shaken by the dusty desert wind, her sleep is disturbed by the image of the deceased. After asking her family for advice, she decides to visit the cousin's tomb, to exhume the remains, and clean his bones: she will have to follow the path traced by an ancient ritual to break down the boundaries between death and the world of the living. A debut feature by Colombian filmmakers César Alejandro Jaimes and Juan Pablo Polanco, Lapü is a journey into a physical and spiritual borderland, which raises questions about mortality and the permanence of the spirit after death. Interpreted by non-professional actors, it is a film that navigates through a thin membrane between fiction and documentary, telling us about a world that does not want to renounce its cultural identity and struggles daily to survive.

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  Juan Pablo Polanco

  Juan Pablo Polanco studied Fine Arts at the Javeriana University of Bogotá. He founded and directs the Colombian production company, Los niños Films, with which he made most of his films, also written and directed by him. Among these, his debut short film A la deriva (2018).

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  César Alejandro Jaimes

  He studies photography and direction at the Corporación Universitaria Unitec Ofician, in Bogotà. In 2016, he directed his debut short film, La Venda, and together with Juan Pablo Polanco, Portete (2017). With Polanco he co-founded the production company Los niños Films.