There is a shot, about forty minutes into 'The Salt Orchard', in which nothing happens for almost four minutes. A woman stands at the edge of a vast white salt flat, watching the wind move across it. The camera does not move. The soundtrack consists of the wind and, very faintly, a radio playing somewhere behind her. It is the kind of shot that will send some viewers to the exits and leave others, like this critic, quietly unable to breathe.
The film, the third feature from the Chilean-Finnish director Ingrid Aalto-Mendes, follows three generations of the Quispe family, who harvest salt by hand from a shrinking lake high in the Andes. The lake is dying, drained by a lithium mine whose lights glow on the horizon at night. Nobody in the film delivers a speech about this. The mine simply sits there, getting closer, while the family goes on cutting salt into blocks as they have for a century.
Aalto-Mendes shot for two years with a crew of five and a cast drawn almost entirely from the region, and the performances have a lived-in quality that no amount of rehearsal could produce. Rosa Mamani, as the grandmother who refuses to leave, has a face the camera seems unable to stop studying. Her scenes with her teenage grandson, who dreams of working at the mine, are the emotional spine of the film, tender and unresolved.
Patience as a politics
It would be easy to describe the film's pace as indulgent, and at three hours and six minutes it will test anyone expecting conventional drama. But the slowness is the argument. By forcing us to live inside the rhythm of the harvest, the long days, the repetitive labour, the evenings around a stove, Aalto-Mendes makes the threat of its loss almost physical. When change finally arrives, in a single devastating cut near the end, we feel it in the stomach.
The cinematography, by the veteran Tomás Echeverri-Lund, deserves particular mention. Shooting largely at dawn and dusk to avoid the glare of the flats, he produces images of astonishing delicacy: pink light pooling in the salt ridges, figures reduced to brushstrokes against a white horizon. A night sequence lit only by the mine's distant floodlights is among the most beautiful things I have seen in a cinema this year, and among the most sinister.
I wanted the audience to feel time the way the family feels it. Not as a story moving forward, but as something that is slowly taken away.
The film is not flawless. A subplot involving a visiting journalist feels imported from a more conventional picture, and the score, used sparingly, occasionally underlines emotions the images have already made clear. These are small complaints. Aalto-Mendes has described her aim as making the audience feel time the way the family feels it, and on that measure the film is a quiet triumph, and one of the year's essential works.
'The Salt Orchard' opens in selected cinemas this month, and it demands to be seen on the largest screen available, ideally in a full house, where the collective silence during that four-minute shot becomes part of the experience. It is not an easy film. It is, however, a generous one, trusting its audience to be patient and rewarding that trust with images and feelings that linger for days. Go, and leave your phone in your pocket.
