El Amparo
(El Amparo)

Recounting a news story from 1988, when the Venezuelan army massacred fishermen on the Columbian border, mistaking them for guerilleros, Rober Calzadilla’s first feature-film combines a powerful dramatic tension with the sharpness of the political. Instead of a historical reconstitution he films the outskirts of a crime that has scandalously remained unpunished: the monstrous imprisonment of the slaughter’s two survivors, the bodies’ tension, the onlookers’ anger and the twilight atmosphere of a village in turmoil. El Amparo (the protection) is a striking, necessary film that undoubtedly helps us to understand Venezuela today. A remarkable gesture against forgetting and its violence. GM

Participation in the 2013 Caracas Produire au Sud Workshop