Doble Yo
Colombia
Felipe Rugeles
One day I found a dusty box full with manuscripts, photographs and films from the colombian ethnologist Gregorio Hernández de Alba. This was an unusual finding because everything was neatly organized as if he had foreseen the possibility that someone would come and give him a sense again. I must say he wanted me to find it and make a movie about his life. This desire forced me to get into his thoughts and secrets, finding hundreds of photographs of women, letters about spells and unseen footage of the 1941 expedition to Tierradentro, south of Colombia. The strangest thing of all was that inside that box I found a dream, a dream of him, where naked women, fog, moist and dry appeared at the same time. Suddenly, and as in dreams Gregorio wakes up exalted with a voice that is not his own and begins to recite, shouting the adventures of a miserable sixteenth- century- spanish- soldier. Everything becomes dark, he appears in the middle of a desert, spits a capuchin missionary and tells him to get the hell out of this continent once and for all, but then with a brotherly hug he apologizes and tells him to stay because he really needs him. The man in his dream is called Pero López, a spanish conqueror and a chronicler of Tierradentro.
In an attempt to make this dream real we came the soldier alive again, bringing him back from Gregorio´s dreams to Tierradentro to recite his chronicle of 1540. Today that miserable soldier dares to call the Nasa indigenous in their own territory as: ‘dirty and ferocious cannibals.’ The answer is perhaps obvious: ‘You, bearded animal, have left us with no memory with that bewitched cross.’
And in an attempt to understand the nature of the invader and colonialism we tension these two ways of understanding the Other, the cannibal and the bearded animal, the crash of two worlds and its consequences: the cursed children of the colony, the mestizo disguised as a politician who seeks to take over the moors, the mountains, the water, everything that he once despised and beleived infinite. The Nasa are again in a position of war.
In an attempt to make this dream real we came the soldier alive again, bringing him back from Gregorio´s dreams to Tierradentro to recite his chronicle of 1540. Today that miserable soldier dares to call the Nasa indigenous in their own territory as: ‘dirty and ferocious cannibals.’ The answer is perhaps obvious: ‘You, bearded animal, have left us with no memory with that bewitched cross.’
And in an attempt to understand the nature of the invader and colonialism we tension these two ways of understanding the Other, the cannibal and the bearded animal, the crash of two worlds and its consequences: the cursed children of the colony, the mestizo disguised as a politician who seeks to take over the moors, the mountains, the water, everything that he once despised and beleived infinite. The Nasa are again in a position of war.
Support:
Festivals and Awards:
World Sales:
Saki Cine