Why a trilogy ?
The starting point is the wealth of a self-contained world, a universe that takes in elements from different traditions and merges them in a particular way. I feel that this world is an interesting subject both in the context of Colombian audiences, who frequently reject anything that seems too embed in popular culture (unless such popular elements are being ridiculized or mocked at), and in the context of a universal audience that may be nourished by this cross-pollination of cultures and traditions.
My chance meeting with Carmen is the underpinning for the first movie. Intended as a portrait of her everyday life, she narrates her encounters with witches and the Devil, and the surrounding temptations that promise an escape from the destiny of poverty and violence that awaits her as a woman in the countryside. This is followed by her accounts of how the memory of these events sprinkled her daily struggles to build a place of her own, a place menaced by the presence of paramilitary armies. “En lo Escondido” is the first part of a project based on the wealth of oral traditions.
This close approach to the feminine world is complemented by the second movie "Los abrazos del río", which aims to get closer to the masculine world. My aim is to piece together a collective portrait of the mutating countryside through legend known as The Mohán (inhabiting the depths of the Magdalena River, The Mohán abducts women and plays, sometimes dangerously, with the lives of the inhabitants of the river banks). The river’s current marks the rhythm, and I tag along once again keeping in mind the relationship between legend and violence: the bodies that the river takes away do not resemble any longer the acts of The Mohán.
I would like to finish with a third movie about the world of countryside women and men displaced by violence that attempt to live in the periphery of Bogotá. The movie would focus on the ways these people seek to recreate their everyday lives and traditions, the role played by oral history in this process, and the besiege of violence.
“Campo Hablado” is a documentary project about the wealth of a countryside on the verge of disappearing.
Currently I am doing field work for "Los Abrazos del Rio" and raising funds for its production.