“Where the River Begins”, by Colombian Juan Andrés Arango, is one of the projects selected by the Cannes Film Festival for its Cinefundación workshop, which gives filmmakers the opportunity to meet with potential investors to get their films forward. The festival, which will hold its 75th edition from 17 to 28 May, announced on Tuesday that it has invited a total of 16 directors to participate in that section, created in 2005 to encourage the emergence of a new generation of filmmakers.
“Where the River Begins” is directed by Colombian director Juan Andrés Arango and co-produced by Colombia, Canada and France, which tells us; a journey inland and into the jungle, Yajaira, a young Emberá, and Jhon, a young white gang member, will have to learn to know each other and be responsible for their past actions. Only the jungle, in its immense wisdom, will decide whether they should return to the city or look for a new path.
The director then told the Cineuropa website that with this film he approaches the Emberá community present in Bogotá and those that are still in the Colombian Pacific with the intention of “understanding the reasons for their displacement, the experience of radical adaptation that life in the city entails and the spiritual ties that continue to link them to the territory”.
And he added that this is a film that talks about “the memory spaces that we carry inside and how they become increasingly distant from outdoor spaces that continue to change when we move away from them. Through this topic, I am interested in approaching the Emberá community that has been present in Bogotá for some years and those that are still in the Colombian Pacific territories.”
In addition, this film received the DALE! in San Sebastian. Faced with this, the Colombian filmmaker confessed to the same media that: “It was a great week for us as a team, the work done during the days of the Co-Production Forum was intense but at the same time we have the feeling that it has greatly nourished our development process and given us tools to move forward with our funding process. We come with several proposals, but now we will have to decide many things, make decisions and extend some conversations that fell short of us in San Sebastian.”
Arango presented in 2012 in Una Certain Mirada, official section of Cannes, “The DC Beach”. Together with him, projects from Holland, Zimbabwe, Sudan, Georgia, Egypt, Bulgaria, Turkey, the Philippines, Mianmar, Iraq/Switzerland, Palestine, Czech Republic, Israel and Ethiopia have been selected this year.
Since its launch and until 2019, the workshop has supported 231 projects, of which 182 are already finished and 19 are currently in pre-production. In 2020, despite the health crisis, the filming of three projects could take place.
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