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"Though less than thirty years old, Portuguese filmmaker Salome Lamas has already developed an impressive, diverse portfolio of films that fit loosely into the ever-widening bracket of non-fiction. Produced for different purposes and across varying lengths, Lamas’ films have seen her travel all around the world, visiting increasingly marginal (and recently, liminal) geographies to produce reflexive, experimental portraits of peoples and places at the fringes of existence. The location for her second feature, Eldorado XXI, must be the most extreme yet. Set 5500m up in the Peruvian Andes, the film investigates the mining community of La Rinconada y Cerro Lunar, the highest elevation permanent settlement in the world. Beautiful and tragic in equal measure, it is an atmospheric, vivid documentation of a struggling society; but also maybe the most fully realised example of the methodology of converting theory into practise, or experimenting practically upon conceptual ideas, that connects all of Lamas’ films."