Colombian Cinema

Culture and Arts

By Ricardo Segreda

Colombians have been trying, in fits and starts, to establish a national film industry virtually since the dawn of the medium itself, but until very recently, their success has been at best limited. Not only have aspiring producers, writers, and directors been faced with Hollywood’s domination of the market, Colombian filmmakers were also far behind Mexico and Argentina in creating a niche for themselves as a Latin film industry, even in Colombia.

Shortly after movies were introduced to Colombia at the turn of the 19^th century, the entrepreneurial Di Domenico brothers produced a historical documentary, The Drama of October the 15^th, regarding the Battle of Boyacá, and a more controversial one about the then recent assassination of Rafael Uribe Uribe, a key political figure. For the most part, however, cinema still being a novelty for Colombians well until the 1920’s, creative ambition did not go much further than the Lumière-like filming of everyday life.

The first full-length feature film, Maria, based on a novel by native author Jorge Isaacs appeared in 1922, and in 1924 Under the Antioquia Sky and The Tragedy of Silence opened to a generally enthusiastic response, followed by Claws of Gold in 1926, a critical take on America’s intervention in Colombian politics which resulted in the loss of Panama.

However, these sporadic efforts could not compete with the flood of popular and expensively-produced cinema coming from Hollywood and Germany and featuring such stars as Charlie Chaplin and Greta Garbo. When sound arrived in 1928, Colombian filmmakers could not afford the costly equipment needed to make their own “talkies,” and were thus finished for many years. What was left of the local industry shifted entirely from production to importation.

1941 saw a new beginning with the production of Colombia’s first sound film, and shortly thereafter a Bogotá businessman by the name of Oswaldo Duperly started a production company which, for a few years, made a minor incursion into the Latin market dominated by Mexico and Argentina.

In the 1954, in the manner of Luis Buñuel and Salvador Dalí with Un Chien Andalou, novelist Gabriel García Márquez and painter Enrique Grau collaborated on a surrealist short film, The Blue Lobster, in the hopes of manifesting a renaissance in Colombian film art, but that did not happen.

In the 1970’s, social problems gave rise to an exploitative genre dubbed “Pornomisery” Influenced by the popularity of the lurid Mondo Cane “shockumentaries,” pornomisery captured some of the worst scenes of poverty and degradation in Colombia at the time, but without any accompanying insight or explanation. Around the same time, however, a new box office tax was instituted in order to subsidize the production of short films, something to which aspiring filmmakers responded to eagerly, though few masterpieces resulted.

By the decade’s end, the state sponsored a production company, FOCINE, which was a notable boom to a new generation of ambitious auteurs, and actually resulted in some successes before folding due to mismanagement and an economic crisis

The last ten years has seen Colombian cinema recover, in part because of new government measures to finance and promote filmmaking, and in part due to the international success of films such as Our Lady of the Assassins and Maria Full of Grace, which ironically were made by a Frenchman and an American respectively. However, native filmmakers like Sergio Cabrera, Rodrigo Triana, and Victor Gaviria have succeeded both at home and abroad, winning prizes and box office earnings for works that have tackled Colombia’s many social problems, and Colombia’s film festivals in Bogotá and Cartagena are among the most well-regarded in Latin America.