The Movie.
A journey into the dense jungles of Costa Rica’s Osa Peninsula, where myth, geology, and human obsession converge. The film follows the trace of a legendary alchemist—known as Vampiro Negro—whose presence lingers in stories, landscapes, and rivers shaped by deep time.
Rather than reconstructing legend, the film enters it, allowing the jungle itself to guide the narrative. As the river becomes a living artery of memory and transformation, the journey unfolds as a passage through erosion, creation, and inner change. What begins as a search for a figure dissolves into a confrontation with nature’s raw intelligence, revealing the jungle as both alchemical laboratory and spiritual mirror—an environment where survival, belief, and imagination collapse into one visceral experience.
Production Notes.
Vampiro Negro & The River of Gold was conceived as a descent into landscape, into myth, and into the subconscious terrain that emerges when humans step beyond control. Filming was shaped by uncertainty, physical endurance, and the uncontrollable logic of the jungle itself.
Vampiro Negro & The River of Gold emerged from more than six years of recurring journeys into Costa Rica’s South Pacific Peninsula; a region recognized as one of the most biologically intense places on Earth. What began as an exploration of landscape gradually transformed into a deeper inquiry into myth, imagination, and the human need to assign meaning to nature’s overwhelming force.
As the production moved deeper into the forest, the project itself began to mutate. The boundaries between documentation and invention dissolved, and the legend we had written slowly revealed itself as a parable—less about the origin of the land and more about our own process of self-transcendence. The jungle resisted structure, demanding surrender rather than control. In response, the film abandoned conventional direction and planning, adopting a guerrilla-style approach shaped by intuition, physical endurance, and the unpredictable logic of the environment. Each day’s filming emerged from the residue of the day before, guided by mood, exhaustion, curiosity, and chance.
There were no actors, no staged scenes, and no performances beyond presence itself. What was captured was exactly what unfolded—an emotional expedition rather than a scripted narrative. This stripped-down production ethic allowed the environment to become an active collaborator, shaping the rhythm, framing, and inner temperature of the film.
Vampiro Negro & The River of Gold reflects on humanity’s ancient impulse to seek meaning through the unknown. By embracing an unscripted, intuitive process, the work proposes cinema as an alchemical act in itself: a transformation that occurs not by understanding, but by enduring the passage. What remains is not an answer, but a residue—an embodied memory of having crossed something irreversible.
"Some forms of wisdom cannot be extracted, only experienced."
The Heart of
the Production
The heart of this production lies in the act of letting go—of control, certainty, and the comfort of predefined meaning. What we thought would be a film about a myth slowly revealed itself as a mirror, reflecting our own fears, obsessions, and transformations as we moved deeper into the territory.
Filming in one of the most biologically intense regions on the planet forced us into a heightened state of presence. The jungle was not a backdrop; it was an active force, shaping our decisions and challenging our perception of time, narrative, and authorship.
By working without actors, rigid scripts, or conventional direction, the film embraced uncertainty as a creative engine. The myth of Vampiro Negro became a vessel through which we could explore transformation, not as a concept, but as a lived experience.