Quijote

As a child, Jairo William Gutiérrez traded a few onions for a ticket to the circus and from then on he only wanted to be an actor and playwright. Today Jairo is 50 years old and farms the land, milks his cow and writes theater. His passion for the stage is so great that he set up a theater company, which is made up of his wife, two daughters and a few neighbors.

Beatriz González, why are you crying?

What happened to painter Beatriz González, who made us laugh with the irony of her works, to get to the point of making a self-portrait that shows her crying naked? The path of the artist is intimately linked with the history of Colombia during the past fifty years.

The Birders

The film highlights legendary Colombian birdwatching guide Diego Calderon-Franco and National Geographic photographer/videographer Keith Ladzinski as they travel through Columbia, a nation that boasts one of the most diverse populations of birds in the world, to capture footage of rare and unique birds, some of which have never been filmed before.

Colombia with Simon Reeve

Simon Reeve visits Colombia in the year of the pacification, at least on paper, between the government, 'aided' by right-wing death squads, and the Marxist FARC guerrilla, which was turning into an armed super-drug cartel and champion of ransom kidnappings. He speaks with people about the horror that hopefully nears its end and the prospects if both sides disarm.

Plains: Testimony of an Ethnocide

A documentary on the massacre of Planas in the Colombian east plains in 1970. An Indigenous community formed a cooperative to defend their rights from settlers and colonists, but the government organized a military operation to protect the latter and foreign companies.

Gamin

After an extensive immersion work on abandoned childhood, Ciro Durán presents, from his point of view, the life of street children, who have broken all family ties and have regrouped to survive in the concrete jungle.

Carlitos Medellin

This documentary reveals the most violent part of the most violent city (Medellin) of the most violent country (Colombia) in the world. For around 75 minutes, different people from Medellin explain how difficult it is to live and survive in a city where violence, weapons, killing is common. Everyday, someone you know may die or get wounded by one of the different armed factions that struggle throughout the country and in the cities to take control over the population, drug cartel, politics, etc... sometimes for no reasons at all but fun.

Walkers of time

María is an Amorúa girl; an indigenous group that traveled the savannas of Orinoquía as nomads. She lives with her grandmother Matilde, her sister diana and her cousins in Puerto Carreño, in the Colombia-Venezuela border. The amorúa are considered wild and are not literate. Matilde wants her granddaughters to learn to write and read to live better in this town of "rational whites" as they call us. The director follows María's life for 8 years from her childhood to her adolescence and invites her to travel the places her grandma did as a nomad.

Lo Mejor de Jaime Garzón

Mama Goema: The Cape Town Beat in Five Movements

If you take a pinch of Khoi-San lament, a dash of Malay spice, a bold measure of European orchestral, a splash of Xhosa spiritual, a clash of marching bands, a riff of rock, the pizzazz of the Klopse, some driving primal beat, and a lot of humour and musical virtuosity, what do you get? Goema Goema Goema! Weaving together the ancient, the traditional, and the classical into the contemporary universal sound of Cape Town, Mac MacKenzie, musical mastermind and founder of The Genuines and The Goema Captains of Cape Town, puts together the final touches to the culmination of his life’s work: Goema in Five Movements. Musicians and musical commentators Hilton Schilder, Neo Muyanga, Iain Harris and Graham Arendse, and new kids on the block, Kyle Shepherd and Shane Cooper, add a contemporary context to Goema, while the orchestra rehearses for its premiere performance at the SABC studios.

The Accordian Kings

Once every decade in a small Colombian village, musicians engage in a fierce battle for the title of the Accordion King. Travel down to Colombia, and go behind the scenes of the Vallenato Kings Festival where, each April, the world's greatest accordionists assemble to perform, compete, and celebrate the squeezebox. Meet the players and hear their stories, including professors of the Turco Gil Academy, where over two thousand children dedicate themselves to their instrument, and Yeime, a young girl who overcame cultural stereotypes to become the first woman to win the competition in over forty years.

Jaguar: Voice of a Territory

Jaguar voice of a territory is a Colombian production that took a decade to complete. It talks about love, affection, respect, humility, temperance and courage. It talks about balance with oneself and the other. It is the voice of a territory and a tradition where the jaguar dwells and seeks to be heard. It is a tour through the mountains, jungles and plains where the jaguar has directly engaged with humans, creating a millenary journey of chants, myths and cultural traditions which narrate the history of the man-jaguar relationship, and speak to the importance of preserving this species which finds itself severely threatened.

La Buena Vida - The Good Life

The village of Tamaquito lies deep in the forests of Colombia. Here, nature provides the people with everything they need. But the Wayúu community's way of life is being destroyed by the vast and rapidly growing El Cerrejón coal mine. Determined to save his community from forced resettlement, the leader Jairo Fuentes negotiates with the mine's operators, which soon becomes a fight to survive.

Colombia in My Arms

After 52 years of armed conflict the FARC guerrillas are about to hand over their arms in exchange for political participation and social inclusion of the poor. Ernesto is one of them. The much celebrated Colombian peace agreement throws Ernesto and the polarised society around him into chaos in which everyone is afraid of the future and their own survival.

Like Shadows Growing as the Sun Goes Down

Medellin. Tireless car traffic. In the margins of a society launched at top speed, some lurking engines shutdown to make a living; Jugglers at intersections, employees on breaks, whose precise and repetitive work mark the flow of time which is always repeated.

Memory of the Silenced: The Red Dance

In the mid-1980s, peace initiatives between the Colombian government and the guerrilla group, FARC, led the latter to disband after two decades of fighting and establish a legal-political party, the Union Patriótica (Patriotic Union). As the UP met with some successs in local elections, it became a target of right-wing death squads and paramilitaries. So far, 3,000 UP members have been murdered or have disappeared, making it a case of political genocide unparalleled in the world. The documentary "The Red Dance" views, through the memories of survivors and relatives of victims, this period of terror and assassination. While FARC has reverted to war, a petition is pending before the Inter-American Commission on Human Rights (IACHR) regarding human rights violations by the State of Colombia.