Relatives aren’t always close. Especially when they are infinitely older. The seven-year-old city girl spends a weekend in the country at her grandmother’s place. She is very scared. But then a thunderstorm comes up …

The tiny island of Santa Cruz is part of the San Bernardo archipelago off the Colombian Caribbean coast, situated within sight of its big sister Múcura. It’s not really an island, more of a coral reef that fishermen used for storage in the past. Then they brought their families here from the mosquito plagued islands, built huts, and today Santa Cruz is a city: 1,200 square metres, 97 houses, 500 inhabitants. Crowded with people and goods this unlikely place serves as a metaphor for our planet for the Colombian director Marcela Lizcano. El Cabo, an old fisherman and lobster diver, acts as a guide who knows how to describe the changes: fish is running low, the lobsters are disappearing and the sea has already swallowed six of the original 16 islands around Santa Cruz. His reflections lead to a residents’ meeting which demonstrates on a small scale how obstinacy, corruption and greed destroy our world. And then there are the children who roam everywhere and for whom the sea is a playground. Their future is not in Santa Cruz. They are drawn to the mainland, where the fun is. They will miss the sea when they wake up there in the mornings. With “Isolated” the director has created the very affectionate portrait of a community whose crisis mirrors all our problems. The only thing is – where can we go?

Matthias Heeder

Every day Dumar says goodbye to his wife and kids in a long ceremony of kisses and blessings as if it was the last time. Equipped with the spiritual protection of his family and the religious protection of the statue of a Jesus with outstretched arms that looks over the green mountains of Colombia from the town of Marmato, he enters the gold mine. For over 500 years, the locals have been digging and blasting narrow tunnels into a mountain that threatens to collapse any minute. But the miners have nothing but gold, even though they are the ones who profit least from it. There has been an international gold rush going on here since the government opened the gates to foreign corporations in 2006. It’s to be the end of the ancient methods. A Canadian company wants to strip-mine the mountain, allegedly in a socially and ecologically sustainable manner. But what will become of Marmato? The battle for one of the biggest gold deposits in the world has begun.
Mark Grieco followed the complex disputes surrounding the exploitation of the mountain, the existence and identity of the natives for six years in a film that has already garnered a number of awards. As tightly plotted as a suspense novel – and with fairly novelistic characters – he tells a tale of growing resistance against globalisation. The current gold rate, burned into the tunnel walls, delivers the comment on the various situations and an old balladeer in a cowboy hat picks his ironic songs on his guitar.
Lars Meyer

An unusual commemoration called “novenario” – a nine-day prayer in honour of the dead. But actually it’s about souls, water spirits, crocodile people and ghosts living on the sites of massacres and haunting people. Today’s children have long forgotten which grave belongs to their family. Memories of the dead civilians in Bojayá, Colombia, killed in a skirmish between FARC rebels and paramilitary forces in May 2002.

Saskia Walker

An animated political thriller based on historical events that were among the most notorious cases of human rights violations in Colombia between 1999 and 2009. They include the massacre of Mapiripán, the killings of the professors of the Universidad del Atlántico in Barranquilla, the “false positives” scandal and the Administrative Department of Security‘s wiretapping affair.

The film opens with the real life murder of the comedian and journalist Jaime Garzón in 1999. The human rights lawyer Fernando Sabogal, a fictional character, gets entangled in a long and difficult judicial process to solve this state crime which will reveal the unsavoury links between drug dealers, politicians, paramilitary groups and the armed forces.

This is the first Colombian animation feature that uses motion capture, a technique where the actors’ movements, facial expressions and voices are recorded simultaneously. It was mainly animated in Blender, an open source 3D software. In this case, the animation works as a device to establish some distance to the subject of violence in Colombia. This allows the viewer to get a different perspective, which in fact creates an intense experience.

Victor Orozco