«Abisal», by Alejandro Alonso, wins the Golden Dove at DOK Leipzig 2021

December 2, 2021

The Cuban film Abisal (2021), the most recent work by Alejandro Alonso (Velas, El hijo del sueño, Home, Metatrón, Duelo, El proyecto, Terranova), won the Golden Dove award for best documentary short film at the 64th edition of the DOK Leipzig Festival, which took place last October in the eastern German city.

The international competition for documentary and animated shorts, where Abisal was selected, also awarded the Golden Dove for best animated short to Figuras imposibles y otras historias I (Figury niemożliwe i inne historie I, Marta Pajek, 2021), a co-production between Poland and Canada, with an honorable mention for the Indonesian documentary proposal Drama telúrico (Tellurian Drama, Riar Rizaldi, 2020).

In the international competition for documentary and animated feature films, the Chinese documentary Padre (Ye ye he fu qin, Wei Deng, 2021) triumphed, followed by another documentary, Bucólica (Bukolika, Karol Patka, 2021), from Poland, which won the Silver Dove.

The German competition for documentary and animated films at the 2021 edition of DOK Leipzig had its winners in the documentary feature Un sonido propio (2021), directed by Rebecca Zehr, and the documentary short Mao rosa (Tang Han, 2020), a co-production between Germany and China.

The Golden Dove and Silver Dove awards are inspired by a work about peace, designed by Pablo Picasso, which has come to define the visual identity of the world's oldest documentary festival, founded in 1955 in what was then the German Democratic Republic.

Alejandro Alonso participated for the second time in this festival, where in its 60th edition in 2017, he won the FIPRESCI prize for his feature film El proyecto (2017). Before him, a Cuban filmmaker had been honored for his body of work: Santiago Álvarez (Now!, LBJ, Hanoi Martes 13), who received an honorary award along with Argentine Fernando Birri (Tire Dié, Los inundados, Org).

On his return to DOK Leipzig, Alonso obtains the Golden Dove with this chronicle about eternal ending, about the melancholic beauty of decomposition and the impressive plunge of wounded leviathans into the mouth of hell, piece by piece.

As happens in his previous Terranova (2020)—codirected with Spaniard Alejandro Pérez and winner in early 2021 of the Tigre Hivos short film award at the 50th edition of the Rotterdam International Film Festival (IFFR)—with the city in full spectral transmutation, Alonso also maps in Abisal erosion, crumbling, the flight of the concrete, the dissolution of the solid. He captures with his lens a world in transition toward mysterious states of existence, incomprehensible to human reason. As its title suggests, the film can equally be a glimpse into the deepest strata of life, to where the roots of the World Tree barely reach anymore.

Alejandro Alonso films in a ship graveyard, where great tankers, with oxidized and silent pride, jut from the waters like their own tombstones. They become massive allegories of the useless and above all of the futility of the mechanistic enthusiasm that led modern authors like Dziga Vertov to compose the impressive kinetic ballets that appear in the classic Man with a Movie Camera (1929): a whole apology for the beautiful and synchronized power of industry as the key and axis of humanity's development.

In Abisal, Vertov's machines fall silent, lose meaning in their definitive immobility. The pistons no longer gallop with unstoppable rhythm toward the future. The gears no longer sing their triumphant hymn, no longer spin like frenetic planets. Rust shrouds them, cushions them, somewhat appeases the cold that the night brings, while at the same time it engulfs and warps their angles. It destroys their individualities, melts their bright and sharp forms into an undefined, dusty brownness. Little by little, the ships transform into dunes. Dust to dust. Water to water.

This last port, as it might seem, does not have the solemn tranquility that might be found in an elephant graveyard, where monsters rest in a peace of titanic bones and ivory. The last dream of the sea colossi is tormented by a final torture, which converts the place into a circle of hell where perpetual dismemberment is suffered, as a penalty decreed upon their heads because of unknown sins. The stranded hulks accept motionless and helpless such torture of mutilation and disfigurement, perhaps begging within themselves to be allowed to drown in peace in the final waters, huddled under the benevolent rust, surrendered to the corrosive lethargy and the benevolent forgetting of themselves.

They also suffer from the perpetual intrusion of men who swarm among them, tasked with breaking their ribs and spines, unconsciously tearing apart the glorious work of other men. They dismantle monuments to human pride, to the triumph of the will that subdues nature and god himself. They are destroyers of illusions, murderers of dreams, demolishers of arrogance. With the dazed mechanicality of perpetuum mobile, they carry out a de-civilizing, anti-mechanistic task, like termites that anchor their existence and subsistence in the conscientious disarticulation of the strongest wooden frameworks devised by engineers.

The anthropomorphic figures end up merging, becoming indistinguishable in the ruinous landscapes where they perform their annihilation tasks. From aggressive and alien beings they transform into complements, symbiotic residents of these sleepy wrecks, unwilling mariners of the many wandering Dutchmen, whose maimed remnants loom over the surface of the waters of the final day.

These men of Abisal, trapped in the graveyard along with the endless skeletons they must dislocate, end up suffering the tautological fates of Sisyphus. They find themselves trapped and condemned at a point of no return, like the naive explorers of a haunted house that traps them in its labyrinths and crushes them with horrors. The executors of the sentence are themselves condemned, and they are ignorant of it. In several of the best shots of Abisal, Alonso—always responsible for the cinematography of his films—merges their laborious forms with the decomposing hulks, binding them to the same fate. They are twilight scenarios where imperious backlighting annuls all perception of individuality, or spaces invaded by dense effluvia that devour forms, empty them of volume and blur any identity.

The main character (Raudel González Cordero) seems at times to acquire a slight awareness of inhabiting a timeless place, foreign, removed from the dialectical flow of existence. A constant drive leads him to sniff around the labyrinthine bowels of dead ships, probing their lost secrets, the remnants of life that may remain huddled in corners and suddenly reveal themselves, causing chaos in the silence. He seeks possible reasons to explain his redundant tasks of destroying the dead, the immobile and the useless. He is drawn to tales of the supernatural, besieged by the sensation that there is something beyond the pre-established normality and the conclusive and Manichaean judgments about good and evil, about what "is" and "is not," without nuance or gray areas. Perhaps he perceives the beyond because he already lives there, because he is a ghost still unaware of his new state. Because perhaps he was always a ghost. Doubt and unease do not abandon him and make him dissonant with respect to his companions, who are more at ease with their surroundings.

Abisal proposes immersion in a sphere of estrangement and atrophy inhabited by monstrosities and specters, illuminated by an end-of-world sun, whose moon is replaced by the cyclopic and luminous orbit of a lighthouse: a kind of infernal Cerberus that seems to maintain a jealous panoptic vigilance over the entire landscape. Alejandro Alonso unfolds a diffuse and abyssally beautiful narrative about the last remnants of life, awaiting the ultimate apocalypse that will plunge everything into nothingness, where, at last, one will be able to dream.