En el corazón de la Atlántida

I was just ten years old when my father, Siro Manuel Lorenzo Salazar, produced this documentary.

I remember that he showed it at home together with other short films, and he commented aloud about anecdotes that happened during the shoot, with the same vivid joy with which he explained curious customs and habits from his country, the Canary Islands.

Siro Manuel, who lived in Barcelona but was born in La Palma (Canary Island), was very aware that many of the customs recorded in the film were changing and disappearing. Many others, which he had known as a child, were already gone and vanished for ever: the "calabaceros" who passed gourds of water up the hill with their arms, women that collected petals for making flower carpets in Mazo, the water-men who carried ice and water in jars form the tip of the mountains to the valley on mules...

Siro Manuel's interest for color and light, that made of him a watercolor painter, is also visible in the documentary "En el corazón de la Atlàntida". Intens red, black and ochre in volcanic soil, bright blue and green in the Atlantic ocean, light yellow and blue in the deep sky above the mountains, with thousands of colours of flowers, are visible on the screen, like several paintings in a sequence of beauty.

He was married to Isabel Galés, a Catalan university teacher connected to literature, and he knew well enough the Catalan poem "l'Atlàntida", by the poet Jacint Verdagué i Santaló. The title of the documentary is joking with the mystic Canary beauty, the secret strange flora and fauna found deep in the volcanic valley and above the clouds at the highest peaks. At the same time, it tries to promote reflexion and interest for the archaeological features, the unknown origin and culture of the old inhabitants of the island.

The reference to lost Atlantis is also an allusion to his childhood in the islands, a reference to his nostalgic sense of lost paradise in his native land. His esoterism was connected to his interest in transcendence as an artist, as much as to his sense of theatrical language and cinema production.

Siro Manuel,dead in January 2003, belonged to the same generation of painters as Raúl Tabares, Manolo Sánchez Mario Baudet, González Bernáldez and others, with whom he was good friends. With many of them he shared affinities for painting, radio, television, cinema and audiovisual sciences. He always regretted that computers and Internet arrived too late for him, although he was still interested in the possibilities of digital image treatment at the end of his life, as much as he was for water color when he started to paint, back in the Spanish postwar era, as a child in La Palma, "la Isla Bonita".

The film "En el corazón de la Atlàntida" was evidence of his creative force, an example of his shared dream with some of his journalist friends: to dedicate a TV series to the Canary Islands and its secret beauty. It was never achieved.

On March 20th, 2005, the Canarian journalist Francisco Padrón Hernández wrote about Siro Manuel Lorenzo: "We wrote a series for TV together when these events (mysteries) were not as fashionable as they were later. This was also a series exclusively dedicated to explaining strange facts and events that happened in the Canary Islands. A complex challenge. impossible to produce. Complete interference." (http://www.atravesdelcristal.com/Noticias.htm)

Those of us who met Siro Manuel and shared dreams with him, know that he was in love with the Canary Islands and their colours, with light and beauty, with literature and challenges. This film is a clear example of all this.