The Costa Rican filmmaker Kim Torres is one of the most exciting emerging voices of Latin American cinema. In her short-film efforts, she presented Atrapaluz at Locarno and Luz Nocturna at Cannes. Yet, she made a splash in the festival circuit with her Solo La Luna Comprenderá (The Moon will Contain Us), a beautiful work about the youth of Manzanillo. It premiered at Locarno and participated in the prestigious Currents section at the New York Film Festival. Two years after the busy festival run with her short documentary, Torres introduces her feature work to the world, Si no ardemos, cómo iluminar la noche (If We Don’t Burn, How Do We Light Up the Night). Similar to her directorial imprint, the poetry of her work appears in the lengthy but intriguing title. What is the fire she mentions in the project’s name? Well, she responds sparsely in her coming-of-age tale, grounding it in the countryside of her country, Costa Rica.
In the first scenes, we watch a girl, Laura (Lara Yuja), a teenager who moves with her mother, Marisol (Michelle Jones), and brother, Esteban (José Gabriel Guzmán Rodriguez), to the interior of the country from San José. Hence, they are living with her mother’s new partner, who has a younger daughter, the little Gabi (Valentina Chaves Jiménez). During the warm summer in Central America, the capital girl has to find her new life where she does not want to be. Her only interests are playing football and wandering the streets with her step-sister. On one of those days, she meets Daniela (Keylin Delgado), a young woman whose mother moved to Texas and left her with her grandmother. Promptly, a new configuration in her life dynamics, where she balances the frustration of being far from San José alongside the thrills of discovering the new place.
In the first moment, the film depicts the sudden change in Laura’s life, as she resumes her journey in a car filled with luggage and memories from San José. Her father divorced her mother through a complicated and traumatic process. Hence, the lead character exhales the rebellious identity of youth, the nonconformity with a reality they cannot interfere with or decide for themselves. She desperately wants to return to the capital, but her mother emphasizes that the village is their new home. Consequently, the film has a naturalistic approach that benefits from Lara Yuja’s teenage anger. The performer conveys the complex emotions of an individual’s formative years, particularly in the psyche and personality. Torres utilizes the scarcity of resources in that place to write a poetry of the beauty of youth and the lack of infrastructure of a bigger city in Laura’s new place. Thus, the debuting director combines a rawness in the cinematography that is consistent with the inexperience of her lead’s career, who has only a previous credit to her name: the short Cabra y Madre.
In this sense, the Costa Rican director revisits a few themes from her career, such as the country’s outskirts, youth, and the island’s natural beauty. Similar to Solo La Luna Compreenderá, Torres observes water as an element of purity present in the growth of a human being. In several locations across the Americas, beaches and woods serve as amusement parks for young people. Even so, the director adds a treasure hunt as the central climax, the event that changes the course of the story, and emotionally impacts all of the characters. The rawness of Laura’s run after an interaction at a LAN gaming center in a garage sums up the sentimental journey of her character, and the dirt in the visuals gives the brown palette on the screen a creative purpose. Contrary to her documentary works, where there is a polish in the imagery and a poetic value in the compositions, Torres aims for a darker, less polished look, which presents a particular restraint in her directing but offers a different proposition to her fictional work.
In a new chapter of her promising career, Kim Torres presents restrained directing and a certain discomfort in the full-length format, a common element for debut directors. Yet, Si no ardemos, cómo iluminar la noche (If We Don’t Burn, How Do We Light Up the Night) is another sign of a brilliant career ahead of the young and talented Costa Rican director. Finally, she continues to find poetic answers to the meaning of freedom, even as the island limits it and suffocates those who grow on it.
Si no ardemos, cómo iluminar la noche (If We Don’t Burn, How Do We Light Up the Night) recently played at the San Sebastian International Film Festival.
Learn more about the film at the IMDB site for the title.
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