Turning Into Stone

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.

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.

After studying abroad, Mercedes returns to Colombia to work on the next film by her father, the famous Víctor Gaviria. Fluctuating between admiration and reproach, Mercedes constructs a private diary that goes beyond familial conflicts to question the place of women in the film world, which is still strongly ingrained with a patriarchal mindset.

An actress prepares for the theatrical adaptation of Hitchcock’s Vertigo. One of the technicians who works at the same theater becomes obsessed with her, because he is reminded of his dead wife.

A filmmaker investigates three cases of violence in Colombia, including a murder occurring near his mother’s home. The narrative follows his attempts to reconstruct these lost lives through archival research and the physical traces left in the landscape. This personal inquiry expands into a broader study of how a nation tracks its missing citizens, eventually mapping the overlap between individual family grief and official state processes of forensic recovery.

On a bustling footbridge separating Argentina and Paraguay, where people traffic all kinds of things in a mix of Guarani and Spanish, we meet Angel. Over the course of the next ten years, Angel will have to make decisive choices for his future.

This documentary, made entirely of archival footage shot mainly by amateurs, revisits 50 years of Chilean history. A fascinating lesson in memory, this personal montage adopts a popular, even fringe, perspective to help write a more complete national memory. As the filmmaker asserts in her narration, there’s the history we’re told, the history we live, and the history we tell ourselves. Between the coup d’état of September 11, 1973, and the recent double failure of the new constitution project, this film shows that the people of Chile have long oscillated between excitement and disappointment, accumulating shattered hopes. Rejecting the pessimism that would trap us in collective immobility, Karin Cuyul instead draws on the past to ask how we can continue to dream of the necessary social and political changes.

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.