THE ALLEGORY OF THE CAVE
The Reason for No More Questions
Pedro Luca Mamaní was someone who marked an initiatory moment in my life. I do not use that expression lightly.
The filming of this documentary took place between 2017 and 2019. I traveled to the cave—his home—on five occasions with different companions, each visit occurring in a different season of the year: spring, summer, autumn, winter, and spring once again. As if caught in an endless cycle, the film began and ended within an ouroboros that, rather than consuming itself, grew and nourished itself through the accumulation of both individual and shared experiences.
The initiation could unfold through an innumerable—or at least, by now, after all these years, immeasurable—multiplicity of reasons and experiences, but I would like to pause on two in particular.
In February 2017, I traveled with Octavio Reyes—then my friend, now the producer of my projects and my brother-in-law. Summers in the Tucumán Yungas tend to be rainy, and that year showed no mercy. Drop after drop, mud after mud, coolness after sun after cloud after smoke.
Recuerdo haber caminado hacia la parte alta de una piedra madre y observar a lo lejos, en el valle, el poblado más cercano: San Pedro de Colalao. Quedé ahí, perdido un momento, preguntándome ¿por qué tomaba esos riesgos?, ¿cuál era la finalidad del esfuerzo físico, intelectual y material de encarar ese proyecto límite? No encontré ninguna respuesta, ni en los árboles ni en el cielo, ni en los senderos, ni en Pedro.
I returned to Santa Fe, my hometown, and for a brief moment I thought I would never set foot in Pedro Luca’s cave again.
Just a few days later, I was already preparing the next journey, scheduled for June, together with Juan Manuel Robles—a boss who became a friend. Juan had been the first producer of Airean INCAA-funded film. He could not endure the pressure exerted by those from the capital and resigned shortly before filming began. In tribute to his abrupt departure, I stepped into the role of production manager and, although they sent a disheveled stand-in to take his place, the logistical execution of the shoot ultimately fell to me. In the credits, his name; in anonymity, mine.
A bit of intellectual catharsis, so no one comes away thinking I'm that good.
The next initiatory experience that shaped that duology occurred that winter.
To avoid going to bed with aching stomachs, we had to relieve ourselves downstream, in a dense thicket below the cave, near the point where the slope met the trail leading to the Puente del Indio— a rock formation crowning one of the peaks, which had served as both a lookout and a point of reference for the ancient inhabitants of the region, and, of course, for us too: the expeditionaries of the new millennium.
The silence of the forest is brimming with sounds, and those sounds become silence through their very monotony. They merge with our thoughts until they overwhelm them, and once their task is complete, they grow quiet within us, even as outside, everything continues to live.
In that place, someone spoke to me: a young blonde woman. I knew who she was, yet I could not fully understand why she appeared there, as a whisper within my mind. She had taken her own life many years before. Jewish, the daughter of one of my high school teachers. It lasted only an instant, and she said to me: “I’m here to watch over you.” I can never remember whether she meant forever, or only for that day, that instant, that tiny and fleeting moment of the present.
That journey came to an end, and two more followed. Thus, the chronicle of Pedro slowly came together.
I never saw them again: neither Pedro Luca Mamaní nor his mountains, nor the stream, nor did I ever hear the young blonde woman again. Nor did I ever again ask myself why I make the sacrifice of continuing to film stories in liminal landscapes, liminal stories, from the margins.
I convince myself almost daily that the liminality and marginality of the position I have chosen offer me a broad spectrum through which to perceive the world we inhabit. To remain at a distance, without telescopes. To remain at a distance while standing beside all those I love. To remain distant in order to contemplate, from and toward the cave, a world filled with shadows that are, after all, shadows only because light emanating from somewhere casts itself upon the moving and unmoving bodies of a complex present.
José David Apel
Junio 2026
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