Text by Wim Peeters
A man wearing welding glasses jogs past the camera through a vast landscape. His footwork has been accelerated in the editing process, and the runner outpaces the scientist, Cano, who is looking for the place where the last wind of the West will blow beyond the 46th parallel. The jogging character calls himself 'Metaphor' and is doomed to forever keep moving. No one is ever to stop him and 'de-metaphor' him. We encounter the scene in Diaz Morales' first feature film, Paralelo 46°. The film was completed in record time on a tight budget in Central East Patagonia. Cano's quest in the Patagonian region is set in an imaginary landscape dotted with the remains of an oil drilling activity from a by-gone age. The camera pans across huge expansive vistas, mountain landscapes and dry gullies but the presence of polluted drilling rigs rapidly transforms the scene into an infected idyll that sums up our contemporary contradictory world in a dialectically polarized image. Like the jogging metaphor, Diaz Morales' images are constantly on the run - in a single image but also in the diachronic time span of the film. The result is a richly coded and fractal filmic progression that, like the jogging metaphor, is constantly moving on the spot or moving from point to point. This, like other of his films, is continuously passing from a concrete geographical or socio cultural context to a fictitious elsewhere.
