Practical Italian Grammar

Machado, a Colombian living in France, is hired to return to his hometown of Medellín and steal an emerald. During the risky execution of his plan, he becomes entangled in a series of events that lead him to reconsider the ultimate goal of his mission.

In 1984, Álvaro Ulcué Chocué, a Colombian Catholic priest and indigenous rights activist, was shot dead. The incident looms against the backdrop of a collage of two archive images from the same year. Documentary footage and fictional gangsters capture the state of a country dominated by drug cartels and social unrest.

Made from found footage and archival material, belonging to a restored VHS tape. It captures a New Year’s celebration in a rural area of the municipality of Argelia, Antioquia, Colombia, in 1993.

Composed entirely of archival footage, the film opens before the first frame with a scraping, rattling and rumbling sound, like pebbles coming loose and starting to roll down a slope. The earth stirs before it starts to slide. What follows is a procession that runs through time and always takes a different form. A funeral procession, a protest march, a sea of fedoras, of uniformed men on horses. And the sound continues to swell.

In every story, as in every past, silence is the guardian of secrets. It protects what should not be revealed, whether out of fear or shame. Sometimes silence takes root until it becomes a habit, but every secret always throbs like a ghost: it is present even in its absence. Emely Vargas was a forgotten diva of Colombian silent cinema, surrounded by the intrigue of an erased past. Today, her story emerges from scattered archives and blurred presences, diffuse figures that remain tied to her name.