Shadow Girl

Blindness, which was defined by the Estagira born philosopher as a privation, a lacking, is the common thread used by the filmmakers (both director and musician) to tell the Shadow Girl’s tale, a moving documentary following in first person María Teresa Larraín’s irreversible path towards the Shadowlands. Filmed with extreme realism, the director travels, along with Jorge’s eschatological (profound, spiritual) music, the way back home, a journey to the past that will drive her to a sort of catharsis, as necessary as painful, caused by her mother’s death. This heartbreaking loss leads her to Santiago’s streets, in her native Chile, where she discovers with amazement a different world, the shadowlands…a puzzling place inhabited by a group of fantastic characters (the Birdman, and the Alameda’s street vendors), who, like herself, must face reality in a very different way. Jorge Aliaga is the best possible lazarillo, the ideal guide to tell this tale of courage, pain and hope… As I already wrote some other time, regarding his work Leontina, Jorge is the poet the Muses envy and the Gods want .
If there is something we have to thank Jorge for is his music’s great ability to move; to connect with the most heartfelt side of our being, the one where we still recognize ourselves as children, beyond our own beings and privations. Larraín says: I feared I wasn’t a normal grandmother… I don’t know if it is fear, I do not know. But one thing I know for sure is that this fear stays, because of Beauty, banished from the musical speech, which eventually distils love and hope only, constant values in the work of this poet of the emotions.
Shadow Girl is a tale of hope, perseverance and faith, virtues that find in music their best ally, and in Jorge their best poet.