El Último Hielero
2012 · 14m · Estados Unidos
Directed by Sandy Patch
Genres: biography, documentary
Tones: contemplative, melancholic
Twice a week for more than half a century, Baltazar Ushca has climbed the slopes of Chimborazo, Ecuador's highest mountain, to harvest ice from its natural glaciers. Once one of some forty ice harvesters, he now works alone while his brothers Gregorio and Juan have left the mountain for steadier work.
Picked by Margot
The scouts
Everyone wants to make the last-of-his-kind elegies now, but Patch refuses the easy sentimentality—there's something almost hostile about how plainly she documents Baltazar's solitude, which is the only reason it lands.
A formally restrained portrait that inherits the tradition of observational cinema while understanding that the real subject isn't loss but the dignity of repetition; the editing respects silence the way Bresson did.
The decision to hold on Baltazar's hands—weathered, methodical, moving through ice with the same rhythm every single time—turns a disappearing trade into something about muscle memory as a form of resistance.