Spanish premiere
No wonder it is called a crime scene. Any collection of materials alters the meaning of things, from relics to scraps and vice versa.
A German ethnologist, Theodor Preuss, collects indigenous objects and copies of indigenous objects in Colombia during the 1910s to later send them to Europe. In the 2020s, a Colombian filmmaker makes a film about that collection. More than 100 years have passed. Minds, knowledge and ideas have all changed. How to make a film today that does not fall into the explanation trap, one that does not put us in the shoes of experts who do indeed comprehend all the contradictions of the past and distant but who simultaneously ignore the fact that those contradictions are staring us in the face and question us? The filmmaker gives us every part of the story without giving us a guide, without imposing a discourse. He respects their differences, accepts the tangents and enigmas, juxtaposes present and past, old pieces and modern work, learning to write and polishing of wood, the European discourse of the early 20th century and an indigenous discourse that is both modern and ancestral at the same time. His story is made of distances that neither erase nor conceal. Distances between cultures, between continents and between times. He knows that cinema can bring us closer to the far away but that it is also an art of distances. An art that can make us feel very close to that which is being filmed while, at the same time, make us understand that there will always be a distance. An art that, while making things visible, also creates blind spots. What we comprehend is beautiful but what we see without comprehending it is even more beautiful; knowing that it has meaning but that this meaning will not be captured by our knowledge, by our certainty. At the end of the day, everything is a story of masks too. Unalienable masks that cannot abandon their culture. And the masks we live with too; the masks that we have been given to wear by the place and era in which we live. Masks of another time or another place, but masks of today too; the masks we wear now, here, while we watch the film.
Pablo García Canga