Remember: Everything you don't know about the history of Colombian cinema can be found on Youtube

For some months now, the Colombian Film Heritage Foundation has made a documentary series about national cinema available to Internet users who love film. The production is called “History of Colombian Cinema” and was directed by Luis Ospina and Julio Luzardo.

It consists of 14 episodes in which a rigorous review of the origins of our cinema is proposed. The series was initially intended to be broadcast on public television, with the aim of commemorating the 25th anniversary of the FPFC. Throughout it, we advanced from 1897 to the beginning of the 2000s. We attended several interviews, so far unpublished, with prominent figures of the national film industry at different points in its history; the archival material and the various testimonies are of the highest quality.

Names such as those of Victor Gaviria, Sergio Cabrera, Hugo Chaparro Valderrama and Hernando Martínez, among others, were consulted for the construction of the stories during the series. In the first episodes we witnessed testimonies from important figures such as Manuel Nieto, Juan Di Domenico, Marco Tulio Lizarazo and Hernando Salcedo Silva, as well as other names.

The following chapters, corresponding to “From illusion to bewilderment”, were edited by Luis Ospina and cover the period between 1970 and 1975. In the episodes grouped under the title “Colombian Cinema”, Tomás Corredor is responsible for guiding us through the 90s to 2008, witnessing the liquidation of FocINE and the emergence of the Ministry of Culture and other entities such as the Directorate of Cinematography and Proimágenes Colombia, taking a leap to the origin of Law 814, which enabled the consolidation of a much stronger national film industry.

At the time, Infobae announced the arrival of this series, free of charge, on YouTube, promoted by the Film Heritage Foundation, which for 35 years has worked to consolidate a quality national audiovisual archive, carrying out tracing, recovery and restoration, classification and curation of both visual records and sound, as well as the different elements that make up the country's audiovisual heritage. All this with the aim of preserving our historical memory and making it available to the people.

One of the first films known, screened and produced in our country, is called The Drama of October Fifteenth, directed by Di Domenico and finished in 1915. It's based on a real event, the murder of Rafael Uribe Uribe. At the time, the film generated controversy at the time, as real killers were used as actors. They played themselves. It was never released in theatres and was destroyed by court order. Luckily for moviegoers, the piece has been restored.

In 1922, Maria was filmed, a film based on the book by Jorge Isaacs. Produced by the Di Doménico brothers' company, it was consolidated as a blockbuster. Then it would come, in 1925, Like the Dead, which deals with the story of a man suffering from leprosy. His illness progresses to such an extent that it leads him to madness; his wife does not know it and he begins to experience a deterioration in his health that leads to her suicide. Everything takes place in a turbulent context produced by the pandemic of the time, very similar to the one we are experiencing today.

Colombian cinema has always acted as a transmitter of the social and political realities of our country, which is why many historians have achieved their research thanks to audiovisual documents. There has been talk on many occasions of “literature of violence”, but little has been said about the “cinema of violence”. There is a whole conceptual construction around violence in film discourse. Whether we talk to the exhaustion of April 9, 1948, as the violence of the 80s and 90s, filmmakers have constantly sought to consolidate a film industry grounded in the events that are part of the national memory.

If you didn't know any of these facts and want to know the details of the history of our cinema, remember that the documentary series in question is free just one click away: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RSY2ETNLQ0U&list=PL4lMsVD8f4PTzCP_zT0A89GPX1loRUb0g

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