Mute Fire

While a director makes a film about this the origins of Cinema in Colombia, suddenly, his mother, apparently suffers a strange mental disease: without explanation she stops talking. This situation forces him to stop his film and starts recording his mother’s everyday activity, trying to understand what possibly is happening to her. The director decides to revisit his family’s past and finds a video footage of a children’s theater play, shot by his mother, in which he himself acts as a false guerrilla fighter. This discovery brings him back to his original film and leads him to find the relationship that exists between the origins of Colombian cinema and what the media called “falsos positivos” a painful recent even in which it was found out that the army killed innocent youngsters and dressed then up as guerrilla fighters to give the impression they were winning the armed conflict.—Jerónimo Atehortúa Arteaga