Where the Trees Bear Meat poignantly captures the resilience of a gaucho family facing the harsh realities of drought in the Argentine Pampa. This masterfully executed piece of observational cinema premiered at Visions du Réel in 2024.
“There’s nothing we can do. […] They die of thirst. They die of hunger. They die of death.” This is the bleak realization Omar, a ‘gaucho’ or cattle rancher in the Pampa, comes to. The drought that has been raging for several years in this region of southern Argentina has turned the soil arid, and water no longer flows from the wells used to water the herds. The livestock is agonizing. In Where the Trees Bear Meat, which premiered at Visions du Réel in 2024 in the International Competition Feature Films category, director Alexis Franco introduces us to the daily life of Omar, his nonagenarian mother, and Libertad, his four-year-old granddaughter. Together, this intergenerational trio tries to cope with this increasingly critical situation.
The film opens with the carcass of a cow, dragged behind a car for several meters then abandoned in the wilderness, at the foot of dried bushes, in an open-air cemetery that already hosts several other corpses. Alexis Franco sets the tone for his observational film right from the first minutes. The desperate mooing of the cattle, punctuating the film, contributes to the sense of pervasive oppression. Without artifice and through the example of Omar’s family, the director paints a portrait of a region in agony and an agricultural model that fails to confront current climate changes.
Nevertheless, Where the Trees Bear Meat is also an ode to human resilience. While his mother persists in praying and giving a little water, her most precious possession, as an offering to a supposed deity protecting the gauchos, Omar, far from giving up, strives to find solutions to the problems facing him. We follow him as he repairs the water pumping system with whatever means available, or improvises a hoist to help a weakened cow stand so she can feed. He seems to draw his strength from his very strong bonds with his family. His granddaughter Libertad’s innocence and zest for life are like breaths of fresh air: “If you stand over there, on the mountain called El Nevado, […] you will fly away to the sky,” she marvels. He takes her to the pampa to admire the sunset over the distant hills. These are timeless moments during which he can let himself think and see beyond his imperiled farm.
Formally, Alexis Franco delivers a particularly meticulous and striking work, expressed notably through the aesthetics and variety of visuals – striking wild landscapes, overhead shots of the farm, close-ups capturing the emotions of both men and beasts. Without ever departing from direct cinema, the film depicts a community both isolated and facing major climatic upheavals that challenge its sustainability. In this regard, Libertad’s figure crystallizes the following question: what future awaits her grandfather’s farm, but also the numerous other gauchos who populate the region? Is it the end of an era when it was customary to hang the remains of freshly slaughtered cattle stripped of consumable parts from the trees of the pampa? Here’s another open question suggested by the poetic and enigmatic title of this poignant and brilliantly crafted film.
