Discoveries from Colombia World Cinema

In this comical short, a man has a hard time making breakfast for the woman who sleeps beside him.

A whale hunter loses his family and at the same time he suffers a transformation that makes him into a whale, suffering regret for the acts performed to try out his human consciousness.

'La Pesca' portrays a day in the life of a family of fishermen in Colombia. With poetry and sensorial richness, the film captures the gestures of these men as they weave nets, cook, and play dominoes, all the while waiting for the fish to come so that they can recommence anew.

Two humble fishermen who live in a forgotten hamlet near to the Cauca river, discovered that a dead body had been tangled in their cast net. Failing to give notice to the authorities, they decided that it would be more humane to bury him, so they start dragging the dead body towards the jungle.

This animated film tells the life story of the liberator Simón Bolívar: from his birth in Caracas and his education, to his travels, battles and the struggle against Spanish rule for Latin American independence. In this narrative, historical conflicts are simplified through fictional characters like “Tiránico,” symbolizing Spanish evil and domination, and “Américo,” who represents slavery and the people’s yearning for freedom.

When I was a little boy I saw the FIFA World Cup USA 49 with my father. I used to live in a conservative town, and I had my hair cut as the Roberto Baggio´s, the italian player. My father cutted my hair yelling: Cut you hair as a men! This documentary is the search, still without an answer, about what is a men's hair cut in Colombia.

The Posada Ruiz family began calling Montreal home two decades ago, leaving everything they knew back in Colombia. Navigating their memories, the family retraces their journey, their relationship to the city, and the challenges that arise when trying to find a new home.

Experimental Video Arte

José Alejandro González traveled the world with a camera, capturing faces, voices, and fleeting encounters with strangers. On one of those trips, while working as a cleaner in a hotel in the north, the camera turned on itself. Habitante was born from that gesture: an intimate logbook made up of personal archives, fragments of travel, and shared silences. Through a sensitive and fragmented montage, the film explores the resonances between the filmmaker's life and those he encountered along the way, revealing common echoes of migration, uprooting, and searching. More than a portrait of the other, Habitante is a question about how we inhabit the world, about the sometimes impossible desire to belong. Between tenderness and discomfort, between observation and self-exploration, the film becomes an emotional diary that, by looking outward, ends up revealing the inner landscape of the filmmaker.

2016, in Fusagasugá, Colombia. Paz (11) lives with her grandmother while her parents work far away. One day, she receives a letter from them full of love and hope. Excited, she responds by describing her life in the countryside and her longing to be reunited with them. However, as she hands the letter to her grandmother, she has no idea that it hides a sad reality.

Tom, a skeptical paranormal investigator, explores a two-hundred-year-old house haunted by the legend of the Sisters of the Forest. Dark forces are unleashed when an ancient game begins.

Under a full sun that turns the wide pastures and woods around a house into an idyllic playground, a boy plays with his father to be a man. In the midst of the greenery, the aggressiveness is heartwarming: the father teaches him boxing and with it, the responsibility and restraint that come with mastering one's own body; the boy listens to rap and caresses chicks. Masculinity and childhood are documented in a contradictory, sweet and incautious nature. Seen in this light, the images of upbringing can convince us: love and virtue are built and transmitted in small lessons.

A day in the life of two teenagers as they spend their last time together discovering their hometown.

In the midst of an energy crisis, an oil engineer sent by a European commodities company ventures into a resource-rich Latin American country under a political upheaval. He is tasked with evaluating the integrity of the world's largest oil reservoir, however he is unable to do it, forcing him to escape at any cost.

The visual material belongs to the discards of the film Pura sangre that the Colombian director Luis Ospina made in 1982; The editing and sound were done by Fabián Otero and Juan Camilo Moreno.

Words are not needed for her to understand him... until a certain point. When is it too late to express what you feel in a relationship?

Diego lives with his father in a house with no things, no furniture or anything like it. When Diego comes across an enigmatic wooden chair in the rainforest, his simple world is transformed.

In the hands of the peasant, the countryside becomes a productive space; everything around it bears fruit, not only the land, but also the cultural expressions born from its most intimate experiences, which are expressed through tunes and songs until they turn into celebration.

In 2004, a group of armed people took over Bahía Portete in the upper Guajira, Colombia, and they left the territory desolate for several years until its inhabitants began to return. Portete is situated between life and death, through a voice that comes out of the earth to speak of memories and oblivion. The ruins of the town are mixed with the collective cries of the already blurred faces of the people who lived in it.

When Tita, the heart of her family, begins to lose her memory to Alzheimer’s, her niece looks back at years of family footage to understand the emotional impact of the disease. As the camera becomes a way to care and connect, the film gently explores the quiet struggles of those who take on the role of caregiver and asks what truly remains when memories begin to disappear.

Memories from the neighborhood theaters in Cali, spaces that each summer occupied an important place in the heart of the people. In the neighborhood theaters, among others, Mexican cinema was widely exhibited, which incorporated Cali fashions and even strongly influenced the work of various local artists.

On a desert continent, Caviche and Chelina are faced with a difficult decision when they discover an unexpected pregnancy. Chelina decides to interrupt it due to the fear of facing her violent father. To finance the abortion, they are forced to venture into the world of gasoline smuggling. Together, they embark on a journey through the path of hell, facing challenges and difficult confessions. Amid the aridity of the road, their love will be put to the test as they fight to survive and find a way out.

From the Ellas son de Mercurio series, performative records by artists who inhabit the magical, occult, spiritual and dream spectrum. The Priestess, First piece in which the Venezuelan painter Anna Herrera takes the duality that this tarot card represents, reflecting the opposite but complementary aspects of reality. The High Priestess acts as a bridge between these two worlds, sitting at the door that leads to a deeper and more spiritual one, to esoteric and mysterious knowledge.

A group of bacteria is subjected to experiments that make them question their reality. A social critique of power, social classes and religion.

Napoleon buries his wife behind his house, located in an arid plain of distant mountains. He is an elderly peasant haunted by death and drought, with his wife he has just lost all hope of doing anything to stay alive. A neighbor boy offers him a chance to do something for his life and the lives of others. Napoleon must decide whether to heed the boy's call or put an end to it all.

The story of Charlus Rex, a poet and iconoclast who wanders the streets of Cali while a group of intelectuals consider him their King. Filmed for a TV Series.

Lilia, a Colombian citizen, has lived in eight countries around the world. Now, at the age of 67, she grows old alone in Portugal, caring for an Alzheimer's patient. The filmmaker asks her mother Lilia if she has found home and if she will ever return to Colombia, her native country she hasn't visited for the past 40 years. HOME is a personal-approach documentary about loneliness and the sense of belonging.

Although Santa doesn´t recreate the hell, but its outskirts, the images of the latter make us afraid of what is coming: after death comes a tunnel, and afterwards is the entrance to hell. But this is where The Dark Forest ends.

The director’s grandmother’s hometown had a lighthouse between the mountains, a forest filled with creatures and an echo that sounded every night like the warm wind. That is where the birds went to die. The Night of Minotaur is a fantastic tale that relies on archive footage to build the story of Luz Emilia García, the precursor of porn cinema in Colombia.

Ana Rosa was a pianist and the music was the only thing that went through the wall of silence. She was never talked about in the family, neither my father, nor my uncle psychiatrist, his children. But I was told many times that I looked like her.

Like every day, Alicia takes her son to school. Michael, a teenager overwhelmed by his mother's protection, knows that he can't do much. She is determined to prevent him from being recruited by gangs that spread terror in neighborhoods with invisible borders where every step taken has to be calculated. This is the story of Alicia, the day her son doesn't return from school, and of Michael, the day his miscalculated steps lead them both to the abyss.

Wrongfully accused, Alexander Obregón spent years in prison for a crime he didn't commit, where poetry became his only form of resistance. After regaining his freedom, he returns to a world that still judges him, determined to prove his innocence and uncover who is behind his conviction. Facing a system that refuses to listen and bearing the scars of his past, he embarks on a quest marked by pain and a thirst for justice. Because even in the midst of silence, the truth can find a way to surface and change everything.

Between light, metal and silver, a collection of solidarity pins turns into an archive of another scale: spectres of exile and international struggle against Portugal’s fascist and colonial regime.

A lucid challenge to stereotypes about “marginality”, made in a way that also identifies it as a peripheral cinema as amateur,

Like a word about to be discovered but never heard, Jeròmino Atehortùa's Una película (secreta) peels back the layers of a moving archive of silent Colombian cinema. A kind of mystery seems to live under each of the images, and as the film progresses, a secret language draws a labyrinth: each sequence is a distorted repetition of the previous one, a deformed extremity of a hidden language that unveils those drives and manias of the archive.

When a Kogui child is given a water pistol as a toy, he begins to explore the familiar spaces of his territory with a new look. Sukua fluidly travels through the exterior and interior of his home and some remnants of the community that are manifested around the child's playful sweetness. The strangeness of the toy adds, at the same time, childish tenderness and noisy tension by its contrast with the environment and by the suggested violence that morally affects the father.

Teresita expresses her deep affection and gratitude towards the town of La Candelaria. With pride, he tells how his work in this area allowed him to raise his children and take them to university. This place, with its diversity and cultural richness, has been his second home. However, despite spending half his life there, he has never had time to explore it.

How does a construction evolve? How to build with images and sounds? How is a voice shaped? Construere proposes a look at the work diaries of a film in process about the construction of the Museum of Memory of Colombia, revealing the reflections, questions and contradictions that appear along the way.

Sodoma, the woman of the moon, was born as the possibility of creating collective lesbian sexual fantasies based on tastes, desires and fetishes that do not have the phallus as the center of pleasure. The meeting of these people, in which lesbian and bisexual women and a trans man participate, generates conversations about desires, modesty and the body.

At the beginning of the 20th century, the rubber fever brought entrepreneurs to the Amazon who turned the exploitation of the jungle into a death machine. Some forty thousand indigenous people died, and those who survived slavery, sprouted in this corner of the world.

Barranca travels with his mariachi band to a remote town with the mission of offering a serenade. With no more clue than a voice mail from the client who forgot to give him the address and the name of the woman to whom they should sing, Barranca starts a desperate search through all the village.

Yarokamena, a Uitoto indigenous person, organised an armed resistance to rubber exploitation in the Amazonas. He invokes the spiritual and cosmic forces of war, releasing its destructive power from its container creating a spiral of betrayal and death. Director Andrés Jurado will be present in both screenings.

Luis Alberto Gaitán "Lunga" was a photographer from Guateque, Boyacá. He is the author of the most iconic pictures of the Colombian political leader Jorge Eliécer Gaitán, assassinated in 1948, giving birth to one of the cruellest waves of violence in the country. Since ever, Lunga's photographs have been reproduced over and over again without the proper credits. This film is a trip to the 40's and 50's Colombia's decades and it wants to give to Lunga the recognition of his work and his name in the history of Colombia as a photographer.

In the mountains of a peasant village, a man murders a woman believing that no one has seen him. Guilt, fed by the religious context of the place where he lives and by his own faith, prevent him from resuming his daily life, rarefied by manifestations of a world that.

A misty jungle opens the confines of time and space to converge the times of a colonial era, the echoes of an apocalyptic beast and the open-air prayers of a transanimal ritual. An incantation film, composed of three invocations thirsty for rage and faith in the world.

Gretel, a real estate broker, guides us through places laden with sentimental value and the memories behind each object, each space. The property owners share a deep desire for change and the uncertainty of an island in transition. While property transactions are common in Latin America, in Cuba, they are a recent reality, offering an opportunity to reflect on the value of a house – as a home and as a metaphor for the system, for a nation.

Carlos is left outside his apartment in his bathrobe and underwear. The door is locked and he has no keys. There seems to be no one in the building except Jose, his neighbor across the street, whom he asks for help after avoiding doing so. They both like each other, but have never dared to confess it. They have avoided each other out of fear. As Carlos tries to contact a locksmith in the neighbor's living room the sexual tension between them becomes evident.