The first image one sees while watching Luminum is pretty simple. It shows two women inside an old car in the middle of a barren hilltop — both of them, like the seamen of old using a spyglass to see beyond the mysterious high seas, are looking at the distance with the help of a camera. In the background, we see the darkness of the night sky. And from this austere and intimate shot, the audience can begin to extrapolate the themes that this wonderful documentary, led by the sure vision of the Argentinian director Maximiliano Schonfeld, will deal with.
The two women, Silvia and Andrea Simondini, are ufologists living in a small town in the province of Córdoba, Argentina. They spend their days receiving visitors at their UFO Museum, where they show their decades-long work. Silvia and Andrea are mother and daughter, and as the former mentions in one of the most emotional and grounded moments of the film, “Andrea is what I love most in the world.”
What is the main duo’s goal? To capture evidence of alien life. Where? On the horizon high above the Paraná River. How? In every possible way: from capturing lights in the sky with video cameras, to investigating decaying corpses of farm animals that have died under bizarre circumstances (thinking that their untimely demise might have happened because of alien intervention in terrestrial matters).
With a slow and contemplative rhythm, light hints of spontaneous comedy, and a beautiful and resolute use of cinematography and music, Luminum manages to introduce us into a strange, serene, and unique microcosm without ever losing its focus on being a deeply welcoming documentary in humanly-empathetic and aesthetic terms.
The start of the film is misleading: first, it follows the vicissitudes of two “outcasts” interested in the unknown, the enigmatic distant that is unattainable; however, it ends up being a beautiful and moving meditation on what really matters: what we have around us, sometimes at arms reach.
“You’re not as lonely as you think,” someone tells Silvia at one point of the documentary. And just as it is a cosmologically probable fact, it is true in personal matters: in addition to her daughter, she counts on the inhabitants of the town they live in, the tourists who pass by her handcrafted museum, and, above all, on the aptly named Benigno, an old European man who may be as foreign as the “little green aliens” she searches throughout the profoundly dark sky.
The film explores passion, friendship and filial ties from a transparent perspective, without ever judging the characters who frequent the picture, which is usually filled with three types of images with different textures and aesthetics: firstly, granulated archive footage of newscasts and home videos on VHS; secondly, images of real-time sightings, with erratic points that seem to dance some kind of stellar waltz; and, finally, prodigious earthly images of human bodies as opposed to stormy skies, golden river surfaces that shine beautifully, and naturally portrayed bucolic spaces. It seems like Schonfeld’s camera always finds a way to be there at the moments most deserving of being captured on film.
Going further, in addition to the careful editing, the film is accompanied by a beautiful score that constantly crosses the line between the melancholic and the rare. In this way, the romantic longing that characterizes Luminum puts us in a warm state of being but with a strange body — imagine calm classical music blended with the sound of a theremin (the quintessential musical instrument for science fiction movies that deal with alien life), that, in this case, doesn’t reflect strangeness but rather a fuzzy feeling of familiar bonding.
With a slow, meditative pace, the documentary becomes both an exploration of a rural community and an intimate personal portrait that, although it has no clear ending, is well-intentioned in the way it handles its subject matter. It may not be a film for every type of audience, since it rewards the patience of the spectator, but it still manages to inspire subtle awe within the audience and a craving for more.
And just as the film does not judge Silvia and Andrea, it accompanies them on their vital journey through a world where connection and human affectivity are the real source of existential tranquility. That’s why Luminum is a film that exudes peace, taking as an excuse the search for extraterrestrial life to delve into a lively duo that escapes the common ways of being that we are accustomed to. At a particular point of the film, while observing the suspicious points in the night sky, Silvia asks the cameraman if what they are observing is a UFO parading through the darkness. But, then, the aforementioned man replies with a simple phrase: “I’m filming you.” And just as every human being is a world worth exploring (an alien subject in the eyes of the majority of people, if you will), Luminum captures an unparalleled reality: the particular experiences of folks with stories that transcend this earthly plain of existence. And sometimes said stories paint a pretty stark picture of the space between us — both physically and metaphorically.
