Vida a bordo

Right from the first shot, we are aboard the Explorador, a cargo ship taking us downriver, passing nature reserves as it makes its way to harbor. This visual trip reflects every banal and euphoric aspect of our life, with its cooking, cleaning, boredom, fear and beauty. The Uruguayan director Emiliano Mazza De Luca puts his faith in the sensorial experiences of image and rich soundscape. He doesn’t need many words, but the few we hear are potent—such as the letter in which a child describes what he experiences when his father, a crew member, is away for months on end.

In his exploration of the ship, cameraman Arauco Hernandez Holz encounters all sorts of beautiful compositions and nuances of color. Man and machine enter into a powerful alliance in the many rhythmically edited close-ups of crew members and machine parts. The tilted shots of the omnipresent water and its dizzying ripples and undulations seem to come from some mysterious other world: our subconsciousness.