Diana Bustamante

The Day Is Long and Dark

A Mexican movie director travels the world as a vampire, getting blood from wherever he can at local film festivals.

Our Movie

An extraordinary and necessary essay film constructed entirely out of a vast archive of news footage from the ‘80s and ‘90s, OUR MOVIE (NUESTRA PELICULA) is a response to the violent history that imprinted itself on the director in her formative years in Colombia. Images of blood spatters, bullet holes, coffins, and Colombians marching in the streets become an abstract net of quotidian sorrow.

Memoria

One morning, Jessica Holland, a Scottish orchid farmer visiting her sister in Bogotá, is woken by a loud ‘bang’. This haunting sound dispels her sleep for days, calling into question her identity and guiding her from recording studios to secluded jungle villages in an attempt to find its source.

The Sacrifice

Marcos, a withdrawn park ranger, sees the fragile balance achieved in his isolation collapse with the arrival of a couple of biologists investigating strange bird deaths. Unfortunately, the desire and envy for normality represented by the couple awaken the monster he has been trying to control. His face, his legs, and his arms don’t belong to him and as the desperation becomes incontrollable, he can only see one way out: mutilation.

Land and Shade

Alfonso is an old farmer who has returned home to tend to his son, who is gravely ill. He rediscovers his old house, where the woman who was once his wife still lives, with his daughter-in-law and grandson. The landscape that awaits him resembles a wasteland. Vast sugar cane plantations surround the house, producing perpetual clouds of ash. 17 years after abandoning them, Alfonso tries to fit back in and save his family.

Violence

A man in chains, a young man who dreams of being part of something, to become a militant for an armed group who must wield a cruelty in which he may not believe in. The characters, each voluntary or involuntary part of a mechanism that overcomes them, reveal their greatness or misery in the “minimum” tasks that they perform to survive. From that sometimes morbid poetry of the everyday and the irrefutable truth of the details, we see a country whose social body is sick and injured.

Violence

A man in chains, a young man who dreams of being part of something, to become a militant for an armed group who must wield a cruelty in which he may not believe in. The characters, each voluntary or involuntary part of a mechanism that overcomes them, reveal their greatness or misery in the “minimum” tasks that they perform to survive. From that sometimes morbid poetry of the everyday and the irrefutable truth of the details, we see a country whose social body is sick and injured.

Refugiado

7 year old Matías returns home from a friend’s birthday party to find his mother, Laura, unconscious on the floor. When she recovers her senses they decide to leave home and rush to a shelter for abused women where they spend 48 hours before Laura decides to rebuild her life somewhere else. Through the eyes of Matías we will discover their escape in a city where everything Matías once knew feels dangerous and foreign until Laura finds a secure place to raise her son.

Los hongos

Ras is a graffiti artist from the city of Cali who works in construction, he works during the day and paints walls at night. One day he is caught stealing cans of paint from the construction site where he works, for which he is fired. With no money, he will look for Calvin, another popular urban artist. Both will circulate through the streets without a fixed destination, spreading their art to every corner.

All Your Dead Ones

Salvador is a peasant who one day wakes up as usual to work on his land but instead finds a pile of corpses in the middle of his crops. He runs to notify the authorities but is Sunday and Election Day so the dead ones end up being a nuisance that nobody wants to deal with.

The Wind Journeys

After his wife's death, a vallenato singer from Majagual, Sucre, decides to quit music and return his allegedly cursed accordion to his master. He is joined by Fermín Morales, a teenage boy who admires him and wishes to follow his footsteps. Together, they start a journey throughout several towns in Northern Colombia to Taroa, in La Guajira desert, where the singer's master supposedly lives.