La Anatomía De Los Caballos
In the 18th century, Ángel Pumacahua, a defeated revolutionary, flees back to his native Andean village. But upon his return, the reality he knew has vanished: a meteorite has torn through time, opening a rift that catapults him into the 21st century. Here he meets Eustaquia, a young woman desperately searching for her twin sister, who disappeared while fighting against a mining company that devastates the land. Together, they cross mountains marked by memory and pain, questioning the meaning of revolution today: who do we fight for? And what remains of hope when everything seems already written?
Revolution consists in loving a man who does not yet exist.
— Albert Camus
— Albert Camus
A deeply political work, a cry suspended between historical myth and contemporary denunciation. It is a film that invites the viewer to pause in a contemplative rhythm, rejecting modern frenzy to grasp the density of time.
Angello Faccini’s camera captures the Andean highlands with an almost sacred delicacy: every shot is a painting, and every landscape seems to breathe the weight of history. The cinematography is never decorative, but political: it portrays a territory that is the stage for centuries of oppression. The slowness of the narrative is not empty lethargy, but a deliberate structure emphasizing the resistance of time, the persistence of collective wounds.
The temporal rift opened by the meteorite — which brings Ángel from the era of Túpac Amaru II to the present — is not merely a narrative device, but a powerful philosophical metaphor: the “end of the world” is not an event yet to come, but something that has already begun, everywhere, long ago. Here, revolution is not a closed chapter but a cyclical event that fragments and reassembles over centuries. The film asks: is the revolution truly over, or has it simply transformed?
Ángel, the lost revolutionary, carries an ancient ideal — but when confronted with contemporary extractive violence, environmental devastation, and economic injustice, he must ask himself whether his dream was utopia or condemnation. Eustaquia, in turn, is marked by a personal trauma (the disappearance of her sister) but also by collective pain: she carries on her shoulders a history of oppression that has never ended.
The soundtrack, composed by Inur Ategi, is disturbing in the most purposeful way: it does not passively accompany, but pierces. The sounds interact with the landscape, the mountain silence, the guttural sounds of indigenous languages, and the roar of mining extraction. This unsettling background is not merely aesthetic, but political: it reminds us that past and present are not separate, that yesterday’s violence is today’s violence. In this context, pain becomes revelation.
There is a powerful existential question in the film: “Does pain bring an end to blindness?” Ángel and Eustaquia experience not only an external revolution but an internal one. Their struggle is not just against power, but against historical amnesia, indifference, and oblivion. The meteorite that tears through time is a mythical but also realistic element: it is the trauma of colonization, the extractivism fracturing the soil (both physical and symbolic), but also the possibility of catharsis.
And when Ángel asks, “What must we fight against today?”, the implicit answer is that the enemy is not only external — it is inertia, resignation, mutilated memory. Revolution is no longer just ideological, but ontological: it is the reconstruction of a worldview in which justice and memory are intertwined.
The film deconstructs the revolutionary myth while reaffirming it: revolution is not a heroic gesture from a novel, but a daily, fragmented, painful practice. It is not about epic leaps, but continuous resistance: environmentalism, the right to land, Quechua language as a tool of cultural deconstruction.
La anatomía de los caballos is thus a political-existential denunciation: not only against multinational mining companies but against the mental colonization that persists in collective memory and historical representation. The temporal rift is not an escape, but a crossing.
The film introduces the idea of a “railway track” that seems to retract to allow the passage of a train. Perhaps the “track” is what we believed progress to be: linear, inevitable, directed. But the train — revolution, time, memory — travels against us, emerging from the past, crossing epochs. It is as if, to let the train of justice pass, we must step back on the track of modern illusion, recognizing that the present is not new land, but terrain already traveled, already contaminated.
In this sense, La anatomía de los caballos is not only a historical film but an ethical project: an invitation to look with different eyes. It is a political call to responsibility, but also an existential meditation on time, pain, and the possibility (or perhaps necessity) of a revolution that is not only epic but everyday. In a broken world, the film suggests that healing begins by accepting that the rift separating us from the past is also what connects us to a possible future.
The future is the only transcendence of men without God.
— Albert Camus
— Albert Camus
This movie was in the official competition of Torino Film Festival 2025