Film and TV depictions of Colombia have long emphasised cliched representations of violence and drug dealing. You won’t find any of that in Carropasajero, the new film from Juan Pablo Polanco Carranza and Cesar Alejandro Jaimes premiering this week in Burning Lights Competition at Visions Du Réel.
“The representation of violence in Colombia, I think there is a huge problem with that,” says Carranza. “We have been in a conflict for almost 100 years and it’s a huge question, a dilemma, how to represent ourselves and our relationship with that violence without reproducing it again. We are completely sedated by images of violence in Colombia. We see it every day, all day, and we’ve seen it for three generations.”
Scenes in the film are sometimes shot in near darkness. The director explains there were both aesthetic and practical reasons for this. On the one hand, they were trying to “activate the imaginations” of their viewers n to get away from the imagery of graphic violence. On the other, it isn’t easy to bring expansive lighting equipment to remote desert locations with “no water, no electricity or very little electricity access.”
The film features some juddering shots of passengers on a beaten up old truck driving through the desert between Colombia and Venezuela. These are indigenous men and women of the Wayúu community. Somehow, although the truck is shaking violently, the characters’ faces are all in perfect focus. How did the filmmakers achieve such sharpness of image in such adverse circumstances?
“Well, it looks more difficult than it was,” Carranza says of this footage. He and co-director Jaimes experimented with ways of stabilising the tripod. In the end, they used sandbags and were thereby able to achieve pictorial clarity despite the reverberations.
The film has a dream-like feel. We hear voices of the characters in a “flow-like” way.
“The shots we did were very long, 10 minutes or 20 minutes…the words became alive for us,” the director says of the swirl of testimonies collected in the documentary.
Carropasajero is intended as a follow-up sorts to Lapu (2019), the directors’ earlier documentary about Colombia’s indigenous Wayuu people, focusing on their burial rituals.
“It is deeply related. We got to meet the main families of Carropasajero during the Lapu research process,” Carranza says of the links between the two docs. “It’s like a diptych in a way. This second film is going into concepts in a much deeper and more complex way.”
Ask him what he regards as the key themes of the new film and the director suggests the “most important one is the relationship with the dead.”
The filmmakers have known their subjects for around seven years now. These subjects have endured tough times, especially during the pandemic. Appearing in the film became part of their grieving process for those they have lost.
“In a way, it [the film] is invoking [the dead]. It is a way of giving presence and a voice to those who are not here. For us, that was one of the most powerful things, to feel that the process of [making] a film could be a way of sharing grief.”
Carropasajero is also exploring the grim legacy of colonialism. The Wayuu were never subjugated by the Spanish but suffered grievously at their hands.
“It’s crazy for us whites, a very difficult and abstract thing to understand how they [the Wayuu people] have been fighting for their territory for centuries…”
20 years ago, almost to the day, the Wayuu people were victims of a paramilitary massacre that took place in the town of Bahía Portete. This atrocity is marked every year with special mourning rituals. The filmmakers see their premiere in Nyon as being part of these rituals.
The filmmakers’ shooting style is very distinctive. Again and again, we see close-ups of hands.
“For us, it was important to give the film a sense of physicality,” Carranza explains. On one side, the film is looking at the very rich oral tradition of the Wayuu but, as the director reflects, words can only take you so far. “There is something even unspeakable in what is happening there.” The filmmakers therefore wanted the film to have a sensual quality.
“In the desert, you can feel the wind,” Carranza notes. When the wind blows against them, the Wayuu feel they are being touched by someone they may have lost. The wind gives them a sense of events that may have taken place in the past. “It is something you don’t see, you hardly hear but you feel in your skin.”
The director talks of a moment he cherished during shooting of Lapu. The grandmother of the main character told him to follow her. He had been doing some dirty, backbreaking work but she helped him clean his hands. “She cleaned my hands and I cleaned her hands. It was a very beautiful moment, a deep, deep connection of confidence and trust.”
Carranza also recalls an instance when a character was reburying her brother and took his bones from the tomb. “She cleaned them. It was a way of getting in touch with the dead through the hands…in Lapu, the fact of touching the dead with the hands happened. It was concrete and real and physical.”
Carranza and his co-director Jaimes have a very close bond. “Cesar and me, we are brothers almost. We have known each other since we were 11 years old. My grandfather and his father were close friends…”
When they’re working on a film, they do almost everything together. “It’s like telepathy,” Carranza says of their close rapport.
Carropasajero was produced through Los Niños Films in Colombia and by German outfit Pong. It had backing from the World Cinema Fund in Berlin. The Colombian premiere will be at Cartagena in the presence of the characters featured in the doc.
