Room of Shadows

Pinky is on the run. At night the empty streets smell of the apocalypse and the city seems to be on fire. Narcotics swirl through the veins and the air. Having freed himself from the clutches of a sect led by a certain “padre” and determined to take his fate into his own hands, he is now holed up in an illegal T-shirt factory, surrounded by paints, slogans and heat presses. Pinky is looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, but ghosts are breathing down his neck. He is running for his life, and Colombia is on fire. But Colombia is alive.

Retracing Simón Bolívar's liberation campaign across Colombia, searching for The Liberator's ghost in the high altitude marshlands.

For over 70 years Colombia has been subject to an internal armed conflict whose demarcation lines seem to have become blurred over time. An insidious creeping violence has gradually pervaded the whole of society. Impossible as it is to tell this story in one unified narrative, the history behind this violence seems to take form through a multitude of traces.

To keep the promise she made to her dying mother, a young woman sets off to find her father, a fickle man she has never known. On the way, she discovers he is in fact dead, but, driven by the bewitching rhythms of the Maloya, a Reunion Island ritual singing and musical tradition, she does not abandon her goal: she must find her father.

A man learns his daughter has been brutally murdered by her husband. Time stands still as he oscillates between the need for solace and his urge for revenge. A musical featuring Guinean percussion master, Mohamed Bangoura, “Red Devil”, loosely based on his own story.

The Choco area in Colombia remains isolated between sea and forest. There, religious missions, military operations, and touristic projects have come and gone. Free of narration, Tropic Pocket captures images to witness these actions. The spectator will decide which amongst these layers of reality and mystification are the most deceitful.

A damaged film shot in 1982 in a Latin American country documents the violence that took place on 9 May that year. Beneath its apparent banality, the film raises suspicions of manipulation of the truth.

Medellin. Tireless car traffic. In the margins of a society launched at top speed, some lurking engines shutdown to make a living; Jugglers at intersections, employees on breaks, whose precise and repetitive work mark the flow of time which is always repeated.

This short film is intended to encourage reflection on the history of the Israeli-Palestinian conflict by evoking the performance The Green Line, created in 2004 by artist Francis Alÿs. Marking the Boundary is based on unedited rushes from the film Room of Shadows. The aim of Room of Shadows is to highlight works of art, films and books that discuss the role of images (and representations in general) as vectors of ideologies, or as tools for emancipation.

The 𝘳𝘶𝘴𝘩𝘦𝘴 evidence the presence of the person filming, revealing their movement and their center; they are the record of a hesitation seeking balance, testimony to the measurement of time. In that sustained gaze that pursues the precision of a gesture, meanings and bewilderment suddenly unfold. Filming, then, is the construction of a logic permeated by speculation, which in turn fertilizes it.

Camilo Restrepo reappropriates and remixes a real General Motors promotional film depicting an early-1960s exhibition across the Darién Gap in Chevrolet Corvairs. As the representatives of the global North’s industrial might bridge the same chasm that stands between today’s migrants and the United States, Restrepo considers the unequal flows of people and property between the Americas.