Dislocations of the National: Colombian Cinema and Intercultural Spaces

Abstract

The importance of the global co-production market had a considerable impact on Colombia with a significant number of filmmakers working transnationally or residing in other countries. This paper analyses the challenges to the concept of “national cinema” implicit in the work of three filmmakers producing in those conditions: Laura Huertas Millán, Felipe Guerrero, and Camilo Restrepo. Such challenges are translated into their modes of production and their technical and aesthetic choices. Here, I analyse to what extent their films may be read as resisting dominant modes of production. My discussion also questions the seductions of capital vis-à-vis a self-declared “artist’s independence”. The work of these filmmakers goes along with Laura Marks’s interrogation of how senses and bodily presences can become vital links to home for filmmakers in diaspora, and how cinema may create a medium providing a sense of place and culture. Finally, this article questions whether, in the foregrounding questions of place and positionality, these filmmakers unsettle established narratives of national cinema through counter-hegemonic perspectives.