Colombia in My Arms

After 52 years of armed conflict the FARC guerrillas are about to hand over their arms in exchange for political participation and social inclusion of the poor. Ernesto is one of them. The much celebrated Colombian peace agreement throws Ernesto and the polarised society around him into chaos in which everyone is afraid of the future and their own survival.

Our Film

Faced with his imminent death from AIDS, Colombian artist Lorenzo Jaramillo looks back on his life and work through the five senses.

Ciro and Me

Ciro Galindo was born on August 29th, 1952 in Colombia. Wherever he's gone, war has found him. After twenty years of friendship, I understood Ciro 's life sums up Colombia's history. As so many Colombians he is a survivor, who has run away from war for more than sixty years, and now dreams of living in peace. "Ciro and Me" is a journey to memory, seeking to give sorrow words; a journey, similar to that of Colombia in times of peace, in search to recover its dignity.

Tomorrow's Power

Tomorrow’s Power is a feature length documentary that showcases three communities around the world and their responses to economic and environmental emergencies they are facing. In the war-torn, oil-rich Arauca province in Colombia, communities have been building a peace process from the bottom up. In Germany activists are pushing the country to fully divest from fossil-fuel extraction and complete its transition to renewable energy. In Gaza health practitioners are harnessing solar power to battle daily life-threatening energy blackouts in hospitals.

La Buena Vida - The Good Life

The village of Tamaquito lies deep in the forests of Colombia. Here, nature provides the people with everything they need. But the Wayúu community's way of life is being destroyed by the vast and rapidly growing El Cerrejón coal mine. Determined to save his community from forced resettlement, the leader Jairo Fuentes negotiates with the mine's operators, which soon becomes a fight to survive.

The Birders

The film highlights legendary Colombian birdwatching guide Diego Calderon-Franco and National Geographic photographer/videographer Keith Ladzinski as they travel through Columbia, a nation that boasts one of the most diverse populations of birds in the world, to capture footage of rare and unique birds, some of which have never been filmed before.

Those Waiting in the Dark

In the darkness of a long night, the Colombian country shows another face. An invisible world takes the place of the other one. So one better stays at home and open his ears: half-human and half-beast, something is wandering in the dark. Only some people are able to face it. During her whole life, Carmen was one of them...

Mama Goema: The Cape Town Beat in Five Movements

If you take a pinch of Khoi-San lament, a dash of Malay spice, a bold measure of European orchestral, a splash of Xhosa spiritual, a clash of marching bands, a riff of rock, the pizzazz of the Klopse, some driving primal beat, and a lot of humour and musical virtuosity, what do you get? Goema Goema Goema! Weaving together the ancient, the traditional, and the classical into the contemporary universal sound of Cape Town, Mac MacKenzie, musical mastermind and founder of The Genuines and The Goema Captains of Cape Town, puts together the final touches to the culmination of his life’s work: Goema in Five Movements. Musicians and musical commentators Hilton Schilder, Neo Muyanga, Iain Harris and Graham Arendse, and new kids on the block, Kyle Shepherd and Shane Cooper, add a contemporary context to Goema, while the orchestra rehearses for its premiere performance at the SABC studios.

It All Started at the End

An intimate portrait of the pioneering artistic collective Grupo de Cali, whose work is now considered a fundamental part of Colombia’s film history.

Foreign Wars

From the land of narco-violence to the land of displaced persons. The documentary Guerras Ajenas ('Wars of Others') explores the consequences of the war on drugs in Colombia, and one of its main tools: aerial spraying.

Walkers of time

María is an Amorúa girl; an indigenous group that traveled the savannas of Orinoquía as nomads. She lives with her grandmother Matilde, her sister diana and her cousins in Puerto Carreño, in the Colombia-Venezuela border. The amorúa are considered wild and are not literate. Matilde wants her granddaughters to learn to write and read to live better in this town of "rational whites" as they call us. The director follows María's life for 8 years from her childhood to her adolescence and invites her to travel the places her grandma did as a nomad.

Suspension

In the depths of the Colombian jungle, the skeleton of an immense abandoned cement bridge is tucked away. It has turned into a delusional tourist attraction.

A Matter of Land

A Matter of Land recounts the first year of application of Colombian's Land Restitution Act from the perspective of a community who decide to engage with the process. The film explores the tensions that arise when such communities come face to face with the complex institutions responsible for enforcing the law. The result of these tensions is a narrative worthy of Kafka, in which a doorway to justice is opened for the sole purpose of demonstrating that no one can pass through it.

A Paper Tiger

The life of Pedro Manrique Figueroa, a pioneer of collage in Colombia, is both incomplete and contradictory. Taking his life and work as a pretext, this mockumentary takes the viewer on a journey through history from the year 1934 up until 1981, when the artist mysteriously disappeared from view.

Carlitos Medellin

This documentary reveals the most violent part of the most violent city (Medellin) of the most violent country (Colombia) in the world. For around 75 minutes, different people from Medellin explain how difficult it is to live and survive in a city where violence, weapons, killing is common. Everyday, someone you know may die or get wounded by one of the different armed factions that struggle throughout the country and in the cities to take control over the population, drug cartel, politics, etc... sometimes for no reasons at all but fun.

La Flor de La Lengua de Vaca

Camila lives her last days in the jungle as a guerrilla of the FARC-EP at the crossroads between an uncertain future of peace and the lingering memory of a childhood severely punished. Sent to a war hospital in the middle of the jungle, Camila begins a journey into her past, to the depths of an old wound that needs to be healed. A journey that ends up leading her to an unexpected reunion with her friend Ricardo, a young guerrilla recently amputated due to a mine.

Plains: Testimony of an Ethnocide

A documentary on the massacre of Planas in the Colombian east plains in 1970. An Indigenous community formed a cooperative to defend their rights from settlers and colonists, but the government organized a military operation to protect the latter and foreign companies.

Los Andes Symphony Orchestra

The North of Cauca is the region of Colombia most affected by the internal armed conflict since 1940. There is an orchestra of ancestral music composed of young indigenous people of the Nasa ethnic group who, with their instruments, their voice and their poetry, remember Maryi Vanessa Coicue, Sebastian Ul and Ingrid Guejia, three of the hundreds of indigenous children who have died because of this eternal and useless war between leftist guerrillas, armed groups of the extreme right, drug traffickers and the Colombian State.

Lo Mejor de Jaime Garzón

Quijote

As a child, Jairo William Gutiérrez traded a few onions for a ticket to the circus and from then on he only wanted to be an actor and playwright. Today Jairo is 50 years old and farms the land, milks his cow and writes theater. His passion for the stage is so great that he set up a theater company, which is made up of his wife, two daughters and a few neighbors.