La Verticale Du Fleuve

One morning in May 2012, Suyapa, an environmental activist from the Lenchua community, is found in her bed, her body riddled with bullets. Her brutal death brings together her three daughters, Marla, Indira and Luisa, in the mountain village where they were born, and which the two eldest left ten years ago. For them, there is no doubt that the motive is political: their mother was a nuisance and was silenced. A year after the events, the opening of the trial of the presumed murderers coincides with the launch of the construction of a hydroelectric dam, against which Suyapa has long fought. A monumental edifice, which will tame the course of the Lindo River, will make their town a pioneer in renewable energy, but will alter forever the land of their ancestors and its ecosystem. Divided on the question, the daughters of Suyapa emancipate themselves little by little from the tutelary figure of their mother and see the world of their childhood disappear, while hundreds of engineers and workers arrive, for whom the construction site represents at the same time the promise of jobs and a better tomorrow, a playground where they can satisfy their ambitions and their demiurgic impulses.
Clara Arnaud stages the political stakes and the ecosystemic hazards of a "green" modernity in a bewitching family and choral epic, charged with lyricism and harshness.