Lake Tahoe

Lake Tahoe, America’s second deepest salt water lake, lies in the Sierra Nevada Mountains, on the border between Nevada and California. What the connection between Lake Tahoe and Lake Tahoe actually is is never clearly explained. Or is it? As Lake Tahoe begins, Juan crashes into a lamp post and is forced to seek assistance. We are in what seems like an unknown city in Mexico, on a blisteringly hot day. Juan lives with his brother Joaquin and his mother – who incidentally seems to be totally absent in her two son’s lives and has enough cultivating her melancholy at home in her bathtub. Left to his own devices, Juan must find someone who can fix the car, while he has to take care of his baby brother who sits mostly alone, playing in a tent outside the house. When Juan then meets Lucia, a lone mother, an important intimacy starts to bind them together, since both are youths forced into strict grown-up roles. Lake Tahoe shows us the small seeds of love and intimacy in this reality suffering from a refusal to take decisions and an inability to act. It is a universe full of emptiness, wind and the hum of distant traffic. Young people have to fight for their integrity in an existence in which the adults only want to sleep away the realities of life. The film’s distinctive editing style gives Lake Tahoe a unique presence of the moment: at times this world stands so still that it looks like still photography.