River of the Dog (2024), by Carlos Gómez de la Espriella, is a poetic journey into the heart of Venezuela’s central plains in the state of Guárico, where the Espino community struggles to live in harmony with, and often against, the forces of nature. Opening with words from Venezuelan poet Eugenio Montejo, the film captures a landscape where life depends on cycles of rain and drought, and where rural families -ranchers, farmers, and laborers- face the loss of basic services and the constant unpredictability of their environment. With little dialogue or narration, the documentary unfolds as a meditation on resilience, ancestry, and the fragile balance between humans and the natural world.

Far removed from the political headlines usually associated with Venezuela today, director Gómez de la Espriella introduces audiences to an isolated community where the presence of the state is almost absent and where modernization has yet to arrive. Here, past and present coexist: traditions echo the lives of ancestral peoples who once crossed these plains, even as villagers adapt to contemporary hardships.

River of the Dog is more than a conventional documentary, it is a poetic experience, revealing the Venezuelan tropic as an “absolute”: not only a place we inhabit, but a force that inhabits and determines us.