After world premiering at the Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival, Colombian director Augusto Sandino’s second feature film A Vanishing Fog (Entre la niebla) will make its much-anticipated North American Premiere at the 2022 SXSW Film Festival. The film will premiere in the Visions category for risk-taking artists in the new cinema landscape who defy traditional categorization in documentary and narrative filmmaking.
A visually-exquisite social parable, with echoes of Buñuel and Jodorowsky, and the first feature film to be shot in the mysterious and formidable Páramo of Sumapaz – the largest swath of alpine moorland in the world – A Vanishing Fog draws on longstanding Latin American traditions of cinematic surrealism and innovative applications of science fiction to tell the story of F, a solitary explorer and guardian of the mountains, condemned by his fate, who strives to protect the mystical and fragile ecosystem he inhabits while caring for his ailing father.
Facing the imminent return of an unnamed social and ecological violence, F – played by the emblematic and commanding newcomer Sebastián Pii in his debut cinematic role – yearns to overcome his human limitations and plan his escape, knowing all too well that his departure will come with a heartrending goodbye to the only world he has ever known.
An oblique portal into a surreal and sacred landscape at once otherworldly and completely vulnerable to industrial society’s destructive tendencies, A Vanishing Fog invites audiences to immerse in a sensorial experience of images and sounds that come together to comment on Colombia’s pained histories of human and environmental rights abuses with bold cinematic precision, sensitivity, and innovation.
With breathtaking cinematography by Gio Park in his first feature-length credit, and almost no dialogue aside from choice phrases in the fictional indigenous language Sunapakún, Sandino successfully assembles a singular portrait that speaks to the plight of indigenous peoples on a global scale; by removing the language of the oppressors and positioning viewers within an abstract but personal vision of what has become of his country, A Vanishing Fog allows the emotional experience of environmental extraction to resonate on a human level.
A deeply personal film, perhaps a song or a poem caught between past and future, sanity and delirium, or bliss and tragedy, A Vanishing Fog marks Sandino as an emerging filmmaker to watch on the international festival circuit masterfully mixing sci-fi, arthouse, and genre cinematic elements.
Director Augusto Sandino is one of the outstanding names in Colombian contemporary cinema. Winner of over 30 international accolades and the National Cinema Award 2000-2005 given by the Ministry of Culture of Colombia for his short Aniversario. His feature debut Gentle Breath (Suave el aliento) won the Special Jury prize and the FIPRESCI award at Tallinn Black Nights Film Festival in 2016. Founding Director of the Auteur cinema symposium manifesto with Carlos Reygadas, Lisandro Alonso and Amat Escalante in 2014, Sandino has also been the producer of his films plus the works La forma del presente (The Shape of Now) at DOK Leipzig Next Masters 2018; La torre (The Tower) at IFFR Bright Future 2018; and Karen llora en un bus (Karen Cries on the Bus) at Berlinale Forum 2011. A Vanishing Fog (Entre la niebla) is his second feature film.
Watch the first trailer for A Vanishing Fog (Entre la niebla).