To The West, In Zapata Review (Visions du Réel Festival 2025)

There are few cinematic works that convincingly argue for the enduring relevance of tales. When one such film emerges, it can prompt questions about the necessity of fiction. Personally, I’m drawn to the subtle enchantments of understanding reality through fictitious representations. But in David BIM’s debut feature documentary, fiction is rendered entirely redundant.

Landi lives self-reliantly in Cuba’s Zapata Peninsula. Half his time is spent hunting food for his family, while his wife, Mercedes, looks after their son, Deinis, who lives with severe autism. Landi is an older man, weathered and instinctively attuned to the terrain. The swamp is his domain. He navigates it with a quiet assurance, hunting crocodiles, fishing with makeshift tools, and braving the elements with a practiced calm. In one uninterrupted ten-minute shot, BIM’s camera captures Landi in the act of fighting a crocodile with such dexterity that the scene itself becomes an argument; for the man’s bond with his environment, and for the moral ambiguity of his subsistence. Questions of legality and animal ethics recede under the sheer force of this lived entanglement with the natural order.

This region, however, is far from neutral ground. It is a designated conservation area, internationally recognized for its biodiversity. The Cuban crocodile is critically endangered, with state-controlled policies and breeding farms working to preserve the species. Yet crocodile meat remains a local delicacy, served with pride in restaurants throughout the Zapata region. Many of which almost certainly source it from the black market. These same animals, it should be said, are also displayed in zoos around the world, as part of a national strategy of exchange and survival. In this light, what moral authority can object to a man, otherwise impoverished by urban standards, feeding his family with what is both tradition and necessity?

Beyond this tension, which I suspect BIM is aware of without taking sides, the film is also a product of its time. Shot almost entirely in solitude during the COVID-19 pandemic, the documentary reflects its context through both form and atmosphere. Working alone, the filmmaker accompanies his subjects with a wide-lens camera, capturing both movement and stillness with equal care. A wind-up radio occasionally interrupts the quiet, broadcasting state updates and revolutionary hymns. The sound of news reports and flies becomes the film’s peculiar, persistent score—mechanical, organic, intrusive. As Landi ventures deeper into the swamp, the camera stays with him—among the insects, beneath the shifting canopy, immersed in the unwinding sounds of woods and water. Rendered in daring blacks, gentle whites, and the most vibrant greys, the film offers a patient, quietly reverent portrait of life lived on the margins, where need and emotion are stripped down, only to be seen more starkly fortified.

The second half shifts focus to Mercedes, who tends to Deinis with modest means and quiet resilience. She grows increasingly anxious as Landi delays his return. Their eventual reunion is understated yet deeply affecting; a moment of recognition between two ageing bodies, marked by time and weathered by separate burdens. It is not only a moment of relief, but of mutual understanding: their self-sufficiency sustains them, but it does not insulate them from the persistent weight of scarcity. They remain together through the rhythm of repeated separation, and through a love that has long since dispensed with ornament.