“Macondo” is a fictional place in the novel “One Hundred Years of Solitude” by the Colombian writer Marquez, and is often regarded as a kind of microcosm of Colombia or Latin America. Several artists from China have travelled to Colombia on a journey to find “Macondo”. A visit to Colombia is bound to be complex, as it is the northernmost part of South America, with the southern part straddling the equator. With the Caribbean Sea in the north, the Amazon River and rainforest in the south, the Andes in the west, and the Amazonian plains in the east, it encompasses all the elements of our imagination of South America. Not indifferent nature becomes the subject of the narrative, but also a true witness to the long span of time, as in the case of the giant 500-year-old tree that opens the film, long before the Spaniards came to the New World. All this landscape forms a high-intensity intertextual relationship with these interviewers. “Macondo” is the banana plantation, but it is not, it is such a state of mind, ambiguously omnipresent. It is a state of mind, ambiguous and omnipresent, that paradoxically internalises local and scientific knowledge, primitive and colonial landscapes, myths and realities, fictions and facts.
Directed by Bin Tan (China)