A girl. And a boy. In a remote Colombian town surrounded by lush green and overgrown railway tracks. What does it mean to leave a place that was already left behind?

We are invited into the intimate present of their last day together, an obliquely rendered narrative that cannot escape a soundscape steeped equally in nature and industry. Insistent, striking images of an archival past, connecting them to the promise of the town’s creation—like ghostly hauntings of a fraught colonial history. Tenuous hopes for schooling and making a living. Should they stay or go… as if it were a question.

In Kilómetro 126, Felipe López Gómez revisits his hometown of La Cumbre without pity or consolation. Moments of their ambivalence are captured with both tenderness and clarity, the flux between casual inattention and unspoken tensions of a couple on the cusp: She slowly combs her hair in front of a mirror—her suitcase half-packed—turning to the window. The horse’s beauty captivates. He promises to build them stables, cabins to rent out; they can plant trees, take care of dogs and even the cats—taking off whenever, however far his scooter can take them. But to where?

The answer arrives in the cruel logic of today’s globalism—a complex equation of race, geography and exploitation that ultimately spells enduring economic disparity and, yes, memories of underdevelopment. There is no train. Just the breeze. And a lone seashell bleached white by the sun, found discarded in these landlocked Andean mountains. For the search of one’s future inevitably means leaving home and, for all its beauty, a young love coming apart.

Helen Lee
Filmmaker and York University Alumna