The Gáldar International Film Festival premieres today, at 8:30 p.m., at the Guaires Cultural Center, La Viante, the only Canarian feature film selected among the nine that make up its official section, made by the Tenerife-born filmmaker Miguel Mejías. Shot in Tenerife, Gran Canaria and Fuerteventura, this enigmatic and engaging debut by Mejías, which began in 2018, has taken more than six years to shoot. Starring Ángela Boix and Miquel Insua and produced by Digital 104, Volcano Film and Angharad Rojo, The Traveler is a magnetic film that narrates the life adventure of Ángela, a woman whose life vanishes between the empty routine of which it seems impossible detach himself, who undertakes a journey in which he will discover his special interest in recording insects with his mother’s old camera.
Mejías refers to that journey that Angela begins in his dismantled car in his film. “In the first versions of the script, we suggested that Angela was going to a place called Tule, which in European mythology and classical literary sources, as well as in medieval geography, was something like the far north. That place (an island for many) was located beyond the borders of the known world. Literary references have always been an axis in the construction of the film, and little by little I have been stripping it, trying to get the viewer to contribute their imagination to the movement of the protagonist ». For the Canarian director La Viante plays with many elements of different genres, “highlighting those of the road movie as they are the clearest and let’s say popular, although it moves away from this genre,” he clarifies.
The neutral landscape and its uninhabited physical geography can be considered one more character in La Viante. In this regard, Miguel Mejías warns that «the landscape is a tool that I use to try to access the unconscious of the hermetic characters, that of the film itself, and mine. I try to capture a state of affairs, reflect on the time we live in. In my own way, from a philosophical militancy and a deep love for the cinematographic experience. A film is always a consequence of its present, even if its decontextualization is disorienting ».
