'Dehesa' or the odyssey of time, a unique documentary that crowns the lynx as our lion

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Among everything that distinguishes us from animals, perhaps the most obvious, although hidden in its evidence, is

There are many who insist that we are what we are thanks to pure time, to our less and less valued capacity to wait, to get bored with foundation.

The anthropologist Peter J. Wilson spoke of how man, as a hominid without specific abilities, ended up specializing in everything in general.

And of all his non-abilities, the most sophisticated for being vague was that of making promises: that of imagining future possibilities and perhaps committing to them.

Even lying.

The experience of time postponed and promised (or disappointed) makes us different perhaps.

And yet the movie '

'

has just been seen

, as before her '

'or'

', and one has the feeling in front of it the latest work by

of having ingratiated himself with nature thanks precisely to time, to timeshare.

Because, what is a nature documentary about before animals, plants or insects but about time, the waiting time for precise observation?

And so.

"La dehesa", says the doctoral filmmaker who is also a naturalist (or vice versa), "is the ecosystem with the

and with the particularity that it is a space in which animals have adapted to the intervention of the man. It is a place of harmony in which man plucks the cork from the cork oaks while removing the stubble to protect them from fires and the transhumance of livestock plays a leveling role ".

It is a place, therefore, in which the time of men, as their most genuinely human characteristic, coincides with that of nature.

All of her.

Or at least it has been so far.

The fighting bull in 'Dehesa', by Joaquín Gutiérrez Acha,

To situate ourselves, the film returns to its full form (although everything indicates that there will be more) the journey through the Iberian Peninsula that began in 2013 with the adventure of a fox that traveled Andalusia

That was

.

It was followed by the exemplary

action

(it was that too) of 2017 in the middle of the coastal mountain range starring the bear in the role of a Cary Grant harassed as if it were a Hitchcock movie.

That was '

'.

And now, '

(in the full title goes the name of the gallant) closes a completely unique trilogy in Spanish cinema.

Heir to the classic European productions that range from '

' to

' passing through '

' or '

', the film insists on avoiding the between spectacular and heroic tone of the old Serengeti documentaries to focus on detail, on patience, on the lyrics of, again, time.

"Actually," Acha points out, "there is a nature report in every garden of a house.

."

And we believe you.

"In appearance everything is peaceful, organic, calm ... Each species, including the human being, occupies its place", says Acha.

And he continues: "But as soon as one approaches and waits, the closest thing to

."

To live is to fight, as Mohamed Ali used to say.

At one point, a fox fights its dead prey with vultures.

And in the crackling of the detailed pecks and pecks you can guess the closest thing to a scene from the same Odyssey in which a flock of enraged giants are seen by a cunning and voracious warrior.

Immediately afterwards, the camera descends to the minute to capture the most intimate: the act of love that is also an act of death of a pair of

.

And a little further on,

, superb monarch.

And next to him, the imperial eagle, majestic empress.

And so on, until completing a magical and full cycle of life, of life stopped in time.

The film has been shot over the course of two years.

Maybe three.

Acha's team has traveled

.

And all this to get images as spectacular as that of the

in action on and under the water in

motion at a rate of

or that of the

walking their might in the mist.

What is seen is only a tiny fraction of everything seen and everything shot.

"

" Acha likes to say.

In each image, all the empty time in which the filmmaker, like a hopeful lover, waits, is clearly seen.

It matters, it has already been said, time.

The bellowing of the deer in 'Dehesa'.

Without a doubt, the protagonist is the lynx "with his gaze that pierces".

His regal stance before the objective is the most evident symbol of an achievement that, like that of the dehesa itself, is shared between nature and man.

The program for their recovery has been a success that '

, the film, notes with care.

"It is a beautiful animal. It is our big cat. An endemic species that, like the imperial eagle, only exists here", Acha comments almost formally.

Of the rest, of the precision of that beauty of which he speaks, of the completely extraordinary peculiarity of that strange feline with the

, each almost sacred image of a film is in charge of all this, each time it focuses on the lynx grows until very close to ecstasy.

And by his side, the fighting bull always at the center of controversy.

Always, except when posing naked and

.

It seems that it is known observed.

"What is clear is that if there were no bullfights, there would not be an animal that is selected by man based on aggressive criteria," Acha comments cautiously and exclusively from the naturalist's commitment.

"El toro", he continues, "is an example, perhaps the most graphic, of the meaning of the pasture, one of the few spaces

And in unstable equilibrium, one might add.

To date, the threat of

, as the fatal ghost that runs through it is called, is as clear as it is urgent.

The beetle plague that devours the trunks for years, combined with the fungus that drowns the roots and the forcefulness of the omnipresent climate change that suffocates everything, places the ecosystem on the edge of a slow but implacable abyss.

"There are many factors that determine the dry call. But its ravages are already beginning to be seen and it is time to act.

" concludes Acha.

In truth, what would be lost is both the peculiarity of each species and each detail and something perhaps more generic that concerns us all.

the constancy of the promise that, by definition, we are.

Joaquín Gutiérrez Acha at one point during the shoot.

According to the criteria of The Trust Project

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