The harsh realities of a severely economically depressed area, in the Andes, are brought to the screen by writer and director William Vega. For me, in this slow-paced drama there were just too many plot elements left unanswered and unexplained to rate the movie any higher.

Jochis Seudyn Arias stars as Alicia, whose village was attacked and burnt to the ground and her parents killed in Colombia. She now has made the arduous trek to her only known relative's home, her Uncle Oscar (Julio Cesar Robles). He owns a very run-down inn, named La Sirga, which is beside a beautiful and large lake high up in the Andes.

Uncle Oscar is not thrilled to see his niece, telling her that life is very difficult now in the area due to the diminishment of their chief source of income the coal mines. The area has become something of a "ghost town" now. However, since Alicia is not well, after her long journey, and has nowhere else to go, he allows her to stay.

Alicia quickly proves she's a hard worker helping the regular housekeeper Flora (Floralba Achicanoy) with the cooking, and eventually teaming up to start repairing the dilapidated inn. They also share perhaps "magical thinking" that tourists will eventually show up to stay there. Alicia also struggles with sleepwalking at night and has lots of fears about the past and what will happen in the future.

Alicia begins to bond with the local boatman Gabriel, who transports materials and people around the area. David Guacas does a nice job of portraying Gabriel. Heraldo Romero portrays Oscar's son Fredy, who's Alicia's cousin, and has returned to the house temporarily.

It's at this point that I felt the movie began to suffer from plot elements that left the viewer in limbo. Gabriel seems to possibly be involved in some type of illicit activity aboard his boat, as he meets an unknown person in the high reeds next to the lake. Fredy seems to have a nefarious hidden agenda as well that is never explained, at least to my satisfaction. Finally, both Uncle Oscar and Fredy spy on Alicia at night as she undresses for bed, through cracks in the woodwork, which can be kind of creepy.

Although the cinematography is spectacular and the realism of the economically depressed area is well portrayed by the cast, I felt the film as a whole left me too much in doubt as to what was actually going on.

Though there is obviously conflict in the fabric of this film (Alicia arrives at her Uncle's home having fled the burning of her home and the murders of her family), the film is not about those conflicts, and if you enter this film expecting confrontations and resolutions you will be disappointed. The film is about more even than Alicia's reaction to conflict; it is not just a portrait of PTSD, though that is certainly in there as well. It is about the journey through life in a world of mystery and peril. Even nature herself seems quietly malevolent, a participant in the turmoil that boils beneath the surface. Tufts of weeds move about autonomously, as if participating in the smuggling of arms among the factions of humans who do battle just out of sight. It is about the abandonment of hope and wisdom under the weight of the soggy fabric of reality. Alicia buries candles in the muddy banks of the river when she sleepwalks at night.

In the end, it would be easy to get distracted by questions about who killed whom (though the clues are there if you are interested), but from Alicia's point of view that is a meaningless pursuit. The only distinction between the two sides is the color of the armbands, and she didn't even notice which armband army killed her family. She just knows deaths happened, home was incinerated, and it's time to move on.

This film is very carefully crafted and it is much more of a poem than a novel. It has been several days since I viewed it, and I could not have written about it on the first day. It needs time beyond the time it takes to watch it, and if you give it that time it will reward you richly. It seems to me that the negative reviews share a tone of impatience, a need for the film to tell all, answer all the questions, move from point A to point B in a clear line. If that is your taste, there are many fine films that do that, but this is not one of them. I once took a friend to see Taxi Driver, and he was upset because he was expecting a film adaptation of the sitcom Taxi. His expectations and disappointment had no bearing on the quality of the film that we actually did see, a masterpiece in every way. Same lesson applies here: don't go in expecting it to be something it is not. If you do, you will totally miss this poetic masterpiece.

LA SIRGA ('The Towrope') is a stunningly beautiful little film from the mind and pen and direction of William Vega, a California-born graduate in social communications from the University del Valle in Colombia, who mastered in film and TV scripting at the TAI College of Arts and Entertainment in Madrid. Vega has subsequently served as a university teacher, director, screenwriter and assistant director for film, video and TV projects. In 2010, he was assistant to Oscar Ruiz Navia on the latter's Berlin award-winner Crab Trap. Though he has created several short films - Amnesia (2001), Sunrise (2003), Tricolor Soccer Club (2005), Juan Mochilas (2011) and Simiente 2012 from which he developed La Sirga), LA SIRGA is his first feature film and it is a dazzling success. Vega has said, 'Writing La Sirga originated from my being seduced by the thought of a peripheral geographic location unknown to Colombians and the world. The manifestation of wonderment from the people of that area goes way beyond the space itself. Farmers with an Indian legacy are today ideologically insistent to maintain their traditions, for a clean and transparent relationship with the land and their brothers, so that it may extend throughout time and beyond space. Families and neighbors construct admirable lives in the midst of a country suffering conflict, hunger, inequality and war. This is a community with a proposal to transform thinking and relationships, which other brothers are unaware of, brothers who hurt and bleed the earth dry. Years ago I was working on a TV documentary series. I traveled through remote areas of Colombia, territories where socio-political problems and armed conflict have arisen for many years. In one of these places I found whole communities trying to rebuild their lives, making their existence around a beautiful lake. That was La Cocha, a sacred and inspiring site, full of symbols that dictated a story mixing real and imagined events. That was what shaped this fiction called La Sirga.'

From the opening views of the land and water of the high Andes it is clear that the political unrest that is driving the wandering girl is embodied in wind and water: those natural elements continue to play a central role throughout the film. LA SIRGA a mood piece - magical richly if vaguely evocative. A teenage Colombian refugee, Alicia (Joghis Seudin Arias) is a vulnerable 19-year-old woman who sleepwalks and tries to rebuild her life at an Inn located on the shores of a great lake in the Andes - La Cocha. She is running from the burning of her house and killing of her parents by unspecified hostile forces. Alicia spends her days working with Flora (Floralba Achicanoy) refurbishing the weather damaged inn to make it ready for tourists who never appear, with her uncle Oscar (Julio César Roble) and his son Fredy (Heraldo Romero). No one is very friendly and everything is tenuous but perhaps her greatest ally is Mirichis (the very handsome and gifted David Fernando Guacas), a young man who does errands on a boat and wants to go away with her. All is uncertainty ("I don't know" is the main answer to questions). It's all about metaphor, the dilapidated inn representing Colombia itself. But the place itself, the vast quiet lake and swampy borders and big plants, is also all very real, and conceals the secrets of the underlying strife that is ever present in the way this story unfolds. Watch the opening moments carefully: they hold many answers to the questions the film explores.

LA SIRGA is unquestionably one of the finest art films of the year and William Vega is obviously destined for an important future in the development of cinematic art. And the cinematography by Sofia Oggioni is breathtaking. Bravo to Film Movement for discovering and presenting a true little masterpiece. Highly Recommended.

Grady Harp