Colombia Film Festival returns to New York after two years

The Colombian Film Festival in New York returns, after two years due to the COVID-19 pandemic, “to embrace and celebrate the community” with intimate and intense stories, without neglecting humor, and a closing in tribute to the victims of the Bojayá massacre, on its 20th anniversary, with the film Songs that flood the river, by Germán Arango, on his debut in the United States.

The festival, which will take place from April 28 to May 1, at Cinépolis Chelsea in Manhattan, will open with The Devil, by David Covo Camacho, a tribute to the San Jacinto Bagpiers, a group that preserves the traditional music of bagpipes and drums.

“It's a tribute to the people we love in Colombia, great musicians, renowned all over the world, who have won the Grammy, but live in absolute poverty,” commented the festival's director and founder, Juan Carvajal. They will also present that night Between you and Milagros — winner in 2021 of the best short film at the Venice Biennale — by Mariana Saffon, who will be present at the screening.

Similarly, Carvajal reported that this year's poster for the festival, a work by Colombian Fernando Botero titled Dance, in which a couple — the painter's iconic fat figures — dance embraced in front of a group of people who celebrate, is in tune with the celebration of the Colombian community.

“I think it's time for reunion, to embrace each other again, to touch each other. This poster marks a new beginning, a future for those of us who live this madness of the pandemic and now we will embrace each other again,” he argued.

The armed conflict that Colombia experienced for decades is present with several films, including Amparo, a mother who, when she arrives home, finds that the military has forcibly recruited one of her children and fights against everything to recover him. Also with Tantas Almas, in which an old fisherman faces the tragedy when the paramilitaries kill his two sons and throw their bodies into the river and then he starts a journey through the tributary to recover them.

“It's a heartbreaking, impressive film, with an incredible photograph that portrays pain in a very profound way,” says Carvajal, which also highlights the documentary “On the other side” in which two brothers, after the peace agreement, search for the guerrilla who kidnapped their mother.

The festival, which will be attended by several directors and actors, closes with Cantos that flood the river, about the singers of the Pacific who write songs and sing to the dead who go down the river. “It is a very intimate and painful documentary because it portrays a little what the Bojayá massacre was that marked us so much and a way of paying tribute to all the Colombians who left us with the pandemic,” Carvajal said.

The next day marks the twentieth anniversary of the massacre, when on May 2, 2002, some 80 people died (including 48 minors), after FARC guerrillas dropped a cylinder bomb, during a confrontation with paramilitaries of the United Self-Defense Forces of Colombia (AUC) against a church where the population was sheltered.

On closing night, the singers of the Pacific will be connected to the festival from Colombia to honor those who are no longer there and also to celebrate life, he said.

Keep reading: