The new short film offered by film director Xavier Guàrdia is an amalgam of bucolic sensations of natural landscapes that are lost in our memory and crowded images of the city that stun us as a result of a poorly digested globalization.

In the melancholic views, we see its people working from dawn to dusk with their skin burned by the rude beauty that nature offers us, in this case the Ebro Delta. This produces calm, peace, harmony, through an editing of a filmmaker who pays tribute to the impressionists and of course to the poet Arthur Rimbaud but with a juxtaposition of sequences where the modern and cold of the big city contrasts with the green and peaceful countryside, a world that has been fading since the time of the French bard but it is still there.

As a poet of cinematographic painting, Xavier Guàrdia gives us a metallic gray palette for the city where the mass is swallowed up by itself up to nausea in contrast to the green moors, which reminds us, at certain times, of the painter Jean- François Millet or the dreamy landscape painters of the 19th century.

One of the most tense moments in this film can be found in the two ways of seeing and living the sea, either on a beach overcrowded or an empty sea where one can find his deep solitude sought. With this, the director creates a dialectical, subtle and elegant tension, where one can contemplate his contemporary evolution between the countryside and the city. As Rimbaud sought in his poem Par les soirs bleus d’été, recited off, in a distant 1870 when the modern city was “born” and the countryside was lost to factory smoke.

Synesthetic impressionist film, all of it exudes, also in its editing, a peaceful melancholy that invites calm and introspection (with an inspired Debussyan score by pianist Frederic Oller). But those other disturbing masses shot in the big city show the new and false artificial paradises in which we live crowded together. All of them spawns of globalization with its deafening worldly noise: here the Barcelona underground becomes a great worm, the antithesis of the fascination of the Lumières in The Arrival of the Train at the Station. Times have changed dramatically.

Intelligently and in various languages, Rimbaud’s short poem is repeated to impregnate our memory with bucolic encounters of ourselves in and with the countryside. If in the time of Charles Baudelaire the new was the city, now that is already the past, dirty and ordinary. This visual poem by Xavier Guàrdia takes us back to our origins, where man is born from dust and water and where we should never have left but where we still have time to return, to Mother Nature.