A Song for My Land, a Movie for My Heart
- Ana Carrino
- May 14
- 3 min read
After winning the Green Film Network's Best Feature Green Film last year, the A Song for My Land finally reached Buenos Aires’s commercial theaters, premiering at the iconic Cine Gaumont on April 30th—and it is still going strong two weeks in. I worked on the film’s English and French subtitling and translation in 2024, following its journey from post-production to the international festival circuit (Biarritz, Millenium, etc.).
About the Movie
Ramiro Lezcano, a Santa Fe-born rural music teacher, discovers something disturbing: airplanes are spraying agrochemicals in the surroundings of schools, endangering the health of students. In an attempt to get the children exc
ited about music, Ramiro encourages them to compose songs to denounce this issue, but the initiative meets fierce resistance in the local community and from local authorities. Fueled by his desire to visibilize the issue and ge thte community talking, Lezcano decides to take his project to another level and organizes a massive concert filled with renowned local artists in the middle of the countryside: an “environmental Woodstock”.
The movie follows Ramiro in his odyssey to bring his (and his students') dream to life—during which they have produced three albums and created a movement—, taking us along for a (motorcycle) ride.
About the Ride
And what a Ride it has been. There’s something very strange and beautiful about sitting in a movie theater watching a film years after working on it—especially when you can finally experience it almost like a regular spectator again.
For two years, A Song for My Land existed for me in fragments: subtitle files, timing adjustments, translation choices, isolated scenes watched over and over again on my computer screen. The kind of relationship you build with a film through subtitling is intimate, but also deeply technical. You become hyperaware of rhythm, silence, wording, breath. Sometimes you know a film so closely that it almost stops feeling like a film and starts feeling like a structure you’re constantly repairing from the inside.
The project also came with an added layer of complexity: much of the film’s emotional core lives in the songs written and performed by the kids, which meant the subtitling process involved translating lyrics in a way that preserved not only meaning, but rhythm, tone, and intention.
Beyond the SRT
So seeing it in a theater was unexpectedly emotional. I remembered how beautiful it was. If possible, I liked it even more this time, freed from deadlines and frame counts and character limits, able to simply sit there and let it move me.
And then there’s the larger context that makes the whole experience feel almost circular: A Song for My Land receiving the award for Best Environmental Film, while I’m currently leading the translation and subtitling teams at Argentina’s International Environmental Film Festival. It’s one of those moments where different parts of your professional life suddenly speak to each other across time. The work, the themes, the spaces, the people connect in a way you couldn’t have planned.
Subtitling is often invisible labor. You rarely get a moment where the emotional impact of the work returns to you so directly. But this felt like one of those rare moments: sitting in the dark, hearing the original voices, remembering the care that went into carrying them across languages.
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