Invasión Cine

On 6 March 1906, four men were executed for the attempted murder of Colombian president Rafael Reyes. The event was photographed, and the photos were later used for a fictionalised film on the failed coup. From then on, cinema in this South American country has been inextricably linked to its violent history. Moving images have been used for historiography, propaganda, disinformation and to instil unity in a nation that refuses to come together. Falsos positivos, murdered youths disguised as guerrillas by the army to simulate military success, are a common element.

Mudos testigos is a cinematographic collage made from all the surviving material of Colombian silent films, re-editing the images in such a way as to create a single imaginary film: the impossible love story of Efraín and Alicia that traces the convulsive first half of the twentieth century in Colombia. Compiled by the late Luis Ospina and finished posthumously by Jeronimo Atehortúa.

Forenses (Coroners) interweaves three stories around disappearance and the collective memory in Colombia. The cartography of the country is transformed into a spectral map and the territory and the body merge with the geography. There, the disappeared share the same destiny: to exist, to persist and to resist in the image.

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.