Join us on Saturday, December 6, 2025 from 2pm onwards for a three-part screening and conversation with Portuguese filmmaker and artist Salomé Lamas. The afternoon will begin with a screening of Eldorado XXI (2016), followed by a discussion with the artist and a presentation of the new publication Salomé Lamas: Gold and Ashes (Mousse Publishing, 2025), and will conclude with a screening of Gold and Ashes (2025). 

Working between cinema, installation, and essayistic documentary, Lamas has developed a distinct approach to the environments and social situations she films. Drawing on parafictional strategies that combine sensory ethnography and critical media practice, Lamas focuses on geographies marked by extraction, instability, and forms of life shaped by structural violence. In Eldorado XXI Lamas approaches the twenty-first-century “El Dorado” without the use of voice-of-God narration or illustrative images, whereas in Gold and Ashes she creates a dual narrative space to consider how spiritual consciousness, power relations, and civilizational narratives intersect. Both films demonstrate how Lamas embraces uncertainty and subjectivity as integral to her way of storytelling. By staying with ambiguity Lamas refuses easy comforts of moral absolutism and instead invites the viewer to participate in the labor of meaning-making. Fiction in her work is not used to obscure the facts, but to expose how violently constructed—and violently maintained—versions of the truth can be. 

Program

2pm
Salomé Lamas, Eldorado XXI (2016, 125 minutes)
Eldorado XXI tells of the living conditions of workers in a gold mine in the southeast of Peru. Under the ancient system of cachorreo, the miner works for thirty days without remuneration, and on the thirty-first day, he is allowed to explore the mine for his own profit. To endure this life, the workers chew coca leaves and drink heavily. Set in the highest settlement in the world, La Rinconada in the Peruvian Andes, the film depicts an illusion that leads men to self-destruction, moved by the same interests and dealt with using the same approaches in contemporaneity as in ancient times. The workers foster the hope that one day, without even the minimum for subsistence, they will find the means to resettle elsewhere.

4:30pm
Discussion and presentation
A discussion with Lamas, followed by a presentation of her new publication Salomé Lamas: Gold and Ashes (Mousse Publishing, 2025).

5:30pm
Salomé Lamas, Gold and Ashes (2025, 89 minutes)
Life should be our first object of inquiry and care. The reason for this is clear: we are living beings in a situation in which the conditions of life are under threat. Death has no place in this ecological discourse. While the difficulty of acknowledging death is nothing new, in our contemporary situation, death has a new face. Gold and Ashes goes beyond representation, becoming an intimate act of excavation that proposes to materially, politically and metaphysically mediate the re-appropriation of death as power and our sovereignty as mortal beings both in the private and social spheres.

This program is presented as a continuation of the October 2025 edition of e-flux Film’s series Staff Picks featuring Salomé Lamas. It is organized with the support of Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, Portuguese Short Film Agency, and O Som e a Fúria.

For more information, contact program@e-flux.com.

Accessibility           
–Two flights of stairs lead up to the building’s front entrance at 172 Classon Avenue.
–For elevator access, please RSVP to progam@e-flux.com. The building has a freight elevator which leads into the e-flux office space. Entrance to the elevator is nearest to 180 Classon Ave (a garage door). We have a ramp for the steps within the space.        
–e-flux has an ADA-compliant bathroom. There are no steps between the event space and this bathroom.