100 Days of Solitude

This is a documentary by photographer Jose Diaz about him going to a cabin he used to visit with his family when he was younger, and staying there alone for 100 days. I mean, there's a horse, and he has chickens to form part of his food supply, but no other people.

It's a lovely movie. Diaz brought a drone along to get some aerial shots, and some of the views of the trees in fall, or shots of a deer running through high snow through a pass. There's also a lot of personal moments, Diaz talking to the camera about his family. Or more amusingly, trying to get a pine marten out of his henhouse, so he can get the hens and their chicks back inside before a hawk comes along.

Diaz has added narration in over a lot of the shots after the fact, much of it I wasn't paying much attention to, because I was looking at the scenery. I could look at the scenery, or I could look at the subtitles. I don't speak Spanish.

There's an overarching narrative or how close isolation can be. Diaz is close enough he can stand on a mountaintop and see his home city, or that he can fly the drone over his home. But at one point the drone crashes into a tree and is lost on a ridge somewhere, and when Diaz finds it, he reflects that if he was injured there, no one would ever find him. A ridge in the middle of nowhere, going to no place, no reason for any person to seek him there. He talks about how with distance and time, his relationship and feeling for his loved ones has changed, but he has a dropoff point where he leaves memory cards and fruit he picks in the forest for his family, and he hopes that after they'll leave, he'll come back down and find they've left him a letter. They're distant, but it isn't hard to bridge the gap ultimately.