Not available
Bienvenidos Conquistadores Interplanetarios Y Del Espacio Sideral (Welcome Interplanetary And Sidereal Space Conquerors)
FILM
Colombia, Portugal 2024 · 95 min
Andrés Jurado
It is about a country, Colombia, held in the background of the history of the conquest of space. A literal background, since NASA set up there in the early 1960s, in the jungle on the border with Panama, the Tropic Survival School, a training camp to teach American astronauts how to survive in the event of a forced landing in a so-called hostile environment. A background, which Andrés Jurado, filmmaker of exhumation (see El Renacer Del Carare , FID 2020), transforms here into a center: that of a counter-history of this conquest, written from the Colombian point of view. The director uses (staged) images of the meeting between astronauts and an Emberá shaman in the jungle as a springboard to launch the material of his film into orbit and propel us into an anachronistic and ghostly space. A constellation of archival images, documents, and sound recordings, testifying to the fascination with the race to the Moon and imperialist extractivism, compose this unusual and delirious journey, which follows a double trajectory. Orbital, and mnemonic. The arrangement of these fragments of reality, on which the director intervenes meticulously – by reframing, animation, reconstitution of synthetic voices – suggests in fact the presence of ghosts and the traces of an unconscious memory. Survivals, recalled by the palpitating echoes of Jacqueline Nova's electroacoustic compositions, and which break into the present of the images. Their connection is an act of revelation. And this spectral journey, a powerful political tool. It reveals the fictions at work in the official narrative, and highlights a decentered narrative, which Andrés Jurado offers us to look at in all its complexity, through the telescope of cinema. Louise Martin Papasian
