Showing @ Filmhouse, Edinburgh until Thu 12 Jan

Pablo Giorgelli / Argentina/Spain / 2011 / 86 mins

There’s a silent beauty to Pablo Giorgelli’s debut feature which portraits the nomadic isolation endured by long-distance truck drivers often overlooked in our age of growing trade export. Breaking his usual lonely pattern of transporting lumber from Paraguay to Argentina, Rubén (Germán de Silva) agrees to take Jacinta (Hebe Duarte) and her baby Anahí across the border so she can work and visit her family.

Giorgelli’s film is an endurance test, paralleling the detached lifestyle of the long-distance driver. The silences between Rubén and Jacinta are awkward and they have little, if anything, to talk about. It prescribes the film with a certain claustrophobic element, toyed with by Giorgelli in which whole sections go without dialogue. While this can make it tough to get into, Giorgelli reveals a language beyond words where his characters are connected throughout their actions and behaviour – a smile or a half-glance can feel like a seething melodrama in which a whole relationship could occur. Cast against the sandy beauty of the South American landscape, it’s an entirely romanticised and peaceful road trip movie hidden behind its lack of dialogue and scene changes. While Giorgelli urges us to assess the world beyond words, his film speaks loudly on the tenderness of isolation – if not slowly on its salvation.