WAR TAKES
SYNOPSIS
Bogotá, Colombia, is infamous for headlines of kidnapping, drugs, drug barons, murders, and the longest on going guerrilla war in the world.
WAR TAKES is a feature length documentary that takes our audience inside life in Colombia with our characters, the directors of Citurna TV Productions, Adelaida Trujillo, Patricia Castano and their colleague Colbert Garcia. Citurna Films is a small independent production company that has been making programmes for Colombian television and hard-hitting documentaries for international broadcasters, for the past 15 years. They see their filmmaking as a tool for social change. They have to contend with a lot. The war means that survival isn’t just financial, for them it is also physical and emotional. They are also faced with the contradictions of their work. The more they make films about the war situation in Colombia for international audiences the worse the image of Colombia is perpetuated, falling into the stereotype image of a ‘Rogue State’.
With the recent four year Peace Process collapsed (1998-2002) , the civil war intensifying and the American initiative Plan Colombia expanding, life does go on for our three characters, but not as we know it. Hard choices have to be made. We see them working together at Citurna and dealing with the political events encroaching daily on their personal lives.
The war now permeates all aspects of life, from the monumental to the mundane. Previously it mainly affected the very poor in rural areas but now urban areas are also targeted and today the middle-classes can’t ignore it. Patricia, Adelaida and Colbert provide a voice from that part of society rarely heard in films from developing or war torn countries, as well as the rural poor, portrayed trough their television projects.
There are no clear good guys and bad guys in a country struggling to hold together and build genuine democratic society. As the abnormal becomes the normal, the country’s situation affects all aspects of their lives. Do they try to find the money to get their car bullet proof or is that giving in to the terror? What do they think about national and international solutions to the conflict with the extension of Plan Colombia, which is focusing on a military solution now the peace process has failed? We witness their friends and family leaving or trying to leave.
In War Takes surreal humour is never too far away - they do things differently in Colombia! From jungle talks with guerrillas to elegant dinner parties, our characters show they can’t be judged in conventional left or right terms: their lives break through the stereotypes, forcing us to reconsider our own preconceptions and judgments. For decades Colombia has existed in a state between legality and lawlessness: the film will give us unusual insight, beyond the evening news, into the price its civil society has now ended up paying.
TREATMENT:
WAR TAKESfollows three strands, mixing DV, Beta SP news and archive.
Personal daily life:
Each character kept a DV video-diary of their private lives for 4 years. We get an insight into the decisions and choices of everyday life in a country where the abnormal becomes normal.
Turning the camera on themselves and taking us into their world,they examine their work and politics and expose the sharp contradictions of their lives. Using the intimacy of video diaries our characters create moments of soap opera drama as they negotiate real life. The result is a rare insight into the daily, intense reality of Colombia as it unfolds.
Our Characters
Adelaida explores how she and her husband Caturo deal with the violence that impacts on their daily lives. Now a mother, she must continually decide where the limits of her commitment to work lie. When she started filmmaking she was often in dangerous situations. Today she still takes risks but the decisions are harder as she has two small children. Do you send your child to a school surrounded by machine gun armed guards protecting potentially vulnerable children? Caturo, is a biologist. He has had to pay a protection “fee” to the FARC guerrilla, to go on with his 20-year research work on primates in the Amazon forest. We follow him on a field visit with his family. He knows that Pablo, his 10 year old son, also interested in biology, will not be able to pursue the career he wants unless things change.
Patricia’s life too has changed. Six years ago, in her mid -fifties, she re-married Fernando, a prominent oil lawyer ten years older than herself. She is tireless in her multiple activities and fearless with her social reform agenda on and off Colombia’s screen. But she often ends up arguing passionately against her conservative husband’s sarcastic comments.... Fernando was threatened with kidnap and as a preventive measure; they left the country for three months. Both of her children live in England. On the one hand she is glad because they are ‘safe’ on the other hand they have done what she has fought against, which is people leaving and giving up. She doesn’t want to give up hope for change in Colombia. Will they be able to stay?
Colbert is a cameraman/director just turned forty. On the surface he led a happy-go-lucky life as a partygoer until he fell in love during the making of this film. In his youth he was politically aligned to the guerrilla movement and has been making a film with the displaced from the war over the past five years as well as making human rights programming. He is increasingly aware that his human rights work has made him a target for the paramilitary …he shelters at home, a peasant family, fleeing violence; he knows that at any moment, either guerrillas or paramilitaries can track them down. In December of 2001 one of the peasants he had hidden in the past was murdered by FARC.
Citurna Productions : the centre point that we keep coming back to where we see our characters interacting with each other and others in television production. It is also a haven where ideas and opinions are tested. Lively discussions about what is going on in the country, what films they are or should be doing as well as the more mundane problems of discussing the cash flow to pay the bills.
Through three film projects in progress we get a sense of the range of their work and get a sense of the country.
1.A weekly children’s programme -Aprendertv- a very successful “edutainment” program for children from marginalized areas.
2.A documentary on the ‘Peace Communities’ following a local peace initiative, where poor peasants try to survive the attacks of both guerrilla and paramilitary;
3. TV series on International Humanitarian Law. This takes us to different parts of the country, as they investigate their stories.
Each of our characters is key to one of the projects. We see them on location and in action and they also give us a background to the issues and the country. Here we get a sense of the vast country as well as radically different points of view through the range of characters featured in their work, from paramilitaries to guerrilla leaders.
Major Political Developments weave throughout the film and give context to events affecting our characters, be it historical, or recent political developments. The peace process was not the first and will not be the last. The background to the current civil war and the key players - the main guerrilla groups, the army and the right-wing paramilitaries, as well as the international initiatives like Plan Colombia – are outlined in broad strokes for our audience.
Devises such as news bulletins on their TV’s at home, graphics, archive as well as Adelaida’s narration are used to illustrate this “level “ of the story telling.
Adelaida’s narration provides the necessary background on certain events/places. Her tone is intimate and will introduce the characters giving our audience personal insights and background. At moments it is humorous, at others, when confronted with the horrors of the war, serious.
The film gives a background to the general context, be it political or personal. These include thoughts about the challenges of building a new democracy after ten years of violence, the responsibilities and mistakes committed by their own class, the question of what people like her must be prepared to give up if there is to be an equitable and sustainable peace.
3. Our target audience is the general public that watches the news and finds it hard to get a deeper picture of life behind the war. We feel there is very little programming that allows people to tell their stories from their own countries. It is important for first world audiences, to see and hear what people really do and think, not mediated only by BBC, CNN and other international news agencies. By focusing on the middle classes in Colombia we show a different picture, not just poor victims, which we believe, helps our audiences understand the issues at stake.
- War Takes is appropriate for international audiences because it is humourous, informative and gives insight into a country at war though characters that are engaging, and speak Spanish and English. Colombia is also a country ranking high in the news, but beyond drugs and kidnapping not much is known.
5. The film has been screened in the Amsterdam International Documentary Festival, DocAviv, DokFest, Cine de Las Americas, and will be premiered in the US in the Human Rights Watch Film Festival in June 2003.
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