After the Cities

This experimental film imagines the city of Santiago de Compostela as sentient, revealed through a disjointed tapestry of travel writings. Private voices read personal exchanges as hazy, soft-focus imagery and traced routes merge into a contemplative reflection on memory, distance and transformation through movement in time.

Xacio Baño’s new feature, After the Cities, is an experimental essay film presenting the city of Santiago de Compostela through the eyes of the other, an elusive capital encountered through correspondence in the 21st century. Abstract travelogues unfold within letters, postcards, text messages and handwritten notes, blurring the intimate and the public. Unknown people read aloud from these various texts, transforming personal messages into shared reflections, while dreamlike travel writing and notes offer poetic observations of space and memory, as a father journeys abroad while corresponding with his daughter at home.  

With contemplative framing and soft focus, the gentle urban visuals adopt a hyperreal and contemplative quality, forming a visual diary that drifts between presence and absence. Localities are navigated through maps, photographs and artworks, becoming sites of spectral meditation where the past informs the present. Travel becomes a path toward self-discovery, expressed through a Dadaist play with stamps, postcards and fragmented narratives. Baño’s final instalment of a trilogy of films after Echo (2015) and Deep Waters (2020) proves itself as an existential exploration of connection, distance and remembrance.

– Olivia Hărşan

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