*This is an old version of the film treatment. I´m now working in a new one, but if your curiosity want to know more about the project, it can give you a better impression of the film as a whole.

TREATMENT  

An AI remote robot scrutinises a red landscape that reminds of Mars. The built-in camera tries to focus, zooming in and out, violently changing the frame, scrutinising the landscape, just as Curiosity does on Mars. Its erratic movements seem like an effort to try to understand and recognise what it is seeing. Finally, it manages to fix its sight on something that has caught its attention, a puddle of red water. The soil shakes, the water trembles, blurring the mountains reflected on the puddle.

Fernando, an old man, searches for a station in the radio in his house, until he finds one in which a flamenco singer can be heard. He is a miner from Río Tinto, a historical mining area. He looks out through the windows towards the landscape. Far off an explosion can be heard, the window’s glass shakes, but Fernando continues looking towards the landscape unfazed. He lies down on his sofa and slowly falls asleep.

In the darkness microscopic points of light emerge. They move timidly, like microorganisms seen through a microscope. Slowly we move closer to the points of light until their true nature is revealed: we are in an open air mine in the middle of the night. An alien-like atmosphere where man appears to be a mere extension of machines. The intermittent lights of the trucks go back and forth, moving the soil from one place to another, repeating an infinite cycle of loading and unloading. The shadow of the excavator´s head projected over the soil, it seems like a dragon devouring the mountains. Suddenly we discover the profile of one of the mountains in the mine, illuminated by a full Moon, or is it the Earth?

In this dreamy atmosphere, another storyline unfolds. At night, men with headlights attached to their helmets extract stone samples and red water in test tubes. They look like miners but in fact they are astrobiologists that have arrived to Río Tinto attracted by its river, a unique body of red water whose ecosystem is considered analogous to Mars on Earth. Hands covered with gloves work in a laboratory, applying laser and fluorescent light with different waves lengths over rocks samples. They are studying the dark biosphere that lies in the underground strata of Río Tinto, thousands of years below.

In the background, we hear an astrobiologist tell the story of the first person who speculated about the existence of life deep below our feet, a Jesuit from the XV century called Atanasio Kircher. He explains how in his book Mundus Subterraneus Kircher is ahead of his time by developing the concept of ‘Geocosmos’ and conceiving Earth as a living being. Kircher elaborated a concept of Nature closer to how we understand it today: as an endless entanglements of circuits of which we are a part. Just as history is no longer conceived as linear but more like a circuit full of branches joining from many directions, we also start to see ourselves differently. More as multi-species beings that are part of time scales much more complex than the linear story we were told. 

At sunset, Fernando is having a stroll, accompanied by another old man, his friend Jesús. They arrive to a huge open air mine. We see them reduced to two tiny dots pointing to different directions in the middle of that wide landscape. In the background, we hear them talking. They seem to be trying to put together a mental and spatial reconstruction of a village. But what village? Where is it? Little by little we discover that the village they are talking about is buried there, below the mountains of mineral waste from the mine. They are the last two inhabitants of the historic old village of Río Tinto, a neuralgic centre of the Industrial Revolution.

Fernando and Jesús try to reconstruct the village with their imagination. They are clearly up to something but we don’t know exactly what. The unbearable sound of the trucks unloading the mineral waste buries their conversation. We hear their conversation in waves, fragmented. Throughout their reconstruction, anecdotes emerge that timidly reveal the history of the old Río Tinto village, a history of ferocious colonial industrialisation, in which Río Tinto became yet another island of the British empire. They miss not just the village but also the landscape devoured by the mine. They miss specific hills from their childhood, where they used to play, stroll, or, like Jesús, hide to cry about the death of his father.

A drone flies above Fernando and Jesus through the mine, studying and mapping the area to compile the mine´s aerial data. The standard image from the drone alternates on and off with the topographic LIDAR image from the aerial survey. The drone begins to descend vertically, through the mine´s strata, where we start to travel in time through the mountains and historical strata of Río Tinto. It is a trip of great sensorial intensity, in which archived images of the historical town and its mines blend into the abstraction of the soil. The sounds of the machines in the mine are slowly distorted until they become reminiscent of a flamenco ‘quejío’ (scream).

After traveling through the historical strata of Río Tinto we discover we have gone back 5000 years in time. Ironically, only a kilometre and a half away from Jesús and Fernando, in the same open air mine, a team of archaeologists is digging up another village, a 5000-years old Roman and Tartessian village. In macro shots, ants march over Roman coins and Tartessian tools spread throughout the ground. We continue descending through the strata of the mine until we reach the Río Tinto’s extremophiles that live deep below its surface, in the dark biosphere. Within the darkness we eventually discover that we are looking at a stone through a microscope. With each adjustment of the microscope, the mineral mutates closer to something organic. We only manage to see part of something that moves, it would seem some kind of living being. But we only recognise two strange alien-like eyes.

In the laboratory, an astrobiologist looks at a stone through the microscope. Behind him on the wall we see beautiful old illustrations of the interior of the Earth populated with monsters and dragons. They are illustrations from Mundus Subterraneus, Kirchner´s book. The astrobiologist continues talking about how Kircher, curiously, writes in his book about ‘Panspermia’, one of the hypotheses of the origin of life, which involves extremophiles.

In the same laboratory, other astrobiologists test the resistance of Río Tinto´s extremophiles to Martian conditions on a Mars simulator machine. The extremophiles are not just responsible for the red water of the Río Tinto river but also the mineral wealth of the area. One astrobiologist is researching how extremophiles could be used for space mining in asteroids. Another astrobiologist is researching the role of extremophiles in the colonisation of other planets, specifically in the process of Terraformation.

An astrobiologist pours a drop of red water from Río Tinto in a microscope. We see a liquid universe full of the extremophile fauna of Río Tinto that slowly turns into subaquatic images of the river. From inside the water we hear indiscernible voices from people that are at the shore of the river. A stick enters violently into the red water, making the water spiral. We discover a child playing with the water, spinning the yellow pigments of the sulphur over the red river with a stick. He is mesmerised seeing the spiral of colour over the river, it seems like a galaxy.

We then start a voyage through the alien river of Río Tinto that becomes a physical and mental experience, transporting the spectator to a state of flotation. A sensorial trip, as if we were carried by the river´s stream, observing its surroundings through its alien gaze. Daily scenes and myths from Río Tinto are reflected into its red water. The voyage begins in its birth, close to the mine, ending in the river’s mouth, a lagoon where the Tartessos civilization believed lied the entrance to the underworld.

In the sunset, ships gets into the water. Behind them there is an imposing statue of Columbus pointing to the American lands and 1:1 replicas of the three ships in which Columbus departed to his first trip to the new world. Inside one of the ships we see a 1:1 replica of Columbus seated in front of a table looking to a map. It was from this same lagoon of the underworld that the Age of Discovery was born.

A 3D animation campaign from Space X shows its Crew Dragon spaceship arriving on Mars. Autonomous robots drill the terrain to get the resources needed to build the foundations of the colony. Happy faces stroll through futuristic buildings and see the marvellous technology that will make this dream possible. Into the laboratory an astrobiologist is looking to the Space-X commercial on a screen computer. The commercial ends with the real images of the launching of the rocket Falcon 9 on 30th May 2020, that has put the first private spaceship into orbit, the Crew Dragon.

A hand lights the flame of a fire cracker. The rocket takes off until it explodes in the sky. It’s the day of Santa Barbara (the miners’ patron saint) in Río Tinto. The Virgin has been brought in front of the open-air mine to follow the tradition of explosions and firecrackers in her honour. Jesús and Fernando are among the villagers. The ritual ends with turning on the lights on the large Santa Barbara´s cross, a 10 meters high profile that shines on the mountain in front of the mine. Then we follow through the different surrounding mountains the peculiar topographic process Río Tinto has going through: from high mountains covered with flora and fauna, to sculpted mountains in the mine, until arriving to the dead anthropic mountains that remind of Mars. 

In the middle of these dead mountains, an astronaut roams. Soon we discover that he is one of the astrobiologists that is simulating Mars expeditions and testing autonomous space robots in Río Tinto. In the background, we hear an astrobiologist talking about the difficulty of recognising signs of life on other planets and how extremophiles remind us of the capacity of life to exist beyond the limits of the imaginable. What can we learn from them? Another astrobiologist struggles between the impulse to explore life on other planets and the need to protect that life. Hundreds of years ago, when Colombus’ expedition arrived to the Americas, it killed multiple indigenous lifeforms through microbial contamination. What right do we have to interfere in the natural cycle of a planet?

From afar we see the astronaut-astrobiologist roaming. Suddenly, we discover that who is observing the scene is the gaze of the same remote robot we saw at the beginning of the film. Through its cameras we start exploring the terrain that has become a large Mars scale model. The scenery is one of man-made mountains, made with the mineral waste of the Industrial Revolution. Anthropic mountains that have buried entire villages until becoming the perfect context to simulate expeditions to Mars. A place that can actually be considered a living example of a process of Terraformation, but in reverse. A piece of Earth that has become Mars through man’s direct intervention.

The explorer robot continues surveying the area. A tourist tour train pass very far away with a tour guide explaining the glorious industrial history of the area through a megaphone. The robot gaze continue exploring the red mountains surrounded by industrial ruins, sprinkled by rusty steam engines and trains. The explorer robot looks at the steam machines searching for signs of life, as if recognising itself in them.

Flamenco still sounds on the radio in the interior of Fernando’s house. Topographic maps and old photos of houses and buildings from the old Río Tinto village pile up on his table. Fernando, after early retirement from the mine, started to gather information, through photographs, maps and documents, to build a large-scale model of his childhood town. He wanted to make visible for his family and new generations what is buried today, just like a cadaver, below the waste mineral mountains in the mine. At last, we understand why he was in that huge mine trying to mentally reconstruct his childhood village with his friend Jesús.

At sunset, Fernando goes out to his garden and picks up his binoculars to looks at the mines outside. Through the binoculars, we see the mine. Excavator and dum tracks come and go incessantly, extracting copper and rare-earth elements to fuel the technological revolution. They pour the remains of the mineral on the hills, burying Fernando´s childhood town even deeper below. The intense red of the sunset engulfs the entire scene, it would seem a mine on Mars. Suddenly, framed by the sunset light on the mountain, we see the silhouette of the remote robot relentlessly exploring. 

The trucks, pouring the remains of the minerals waste on the hills, create massive clouds of dust. We follow one of the clouds upwards until it vanishes in the sky. From above, we see a huge hole in the Earth, full of red water, a hole that would appear to have no end. The Flamenco singer continues to sing in the background, a long and deep ‘quejío’, until it becomes distorted into the industrial noise of the mine, an indiscernible and unbearable sound.