Civil Jornal, based in Colombia’s Barranquilla, is teaming with Bogota’s Innoctum Media and Barranquilla’s Estuario Cine to produce “Wood” (“Madera”), a hybrid doc fiction on the cutting-edge of current Colombian film-making in its bold genre mix and approach to Colombian history.
Now in advanced development, and written-directed by Juan Heilbron and Nicolás Palacio, “Wood” will be brought on the market at this week’s Bogota Audiovisual Market (BAM), part of a 15-title line-up of fiction feature projects.
For one thing, “Wood” weighs in as a dazzling genre cocktail, mixing psychodrama, myth, telenovela, documentary and essay, its makers promise.
It also asks how can Colombians capture their past, and heal its wounds. Facts are debatable. What is instantly recognisable is a legacy mindscape, however, and it’s this that “Wood” explores.
“Wood’s” plot set-up departs from a singular set up: “‘Wood’ embodies Caribbean melancholy, presenting a hypothetical scenario where the Colombian state – by way of reparation – deploys actors to perform as absent loved ones within families affected by the country’s violence,” the logline runs.
A 60-year-old actor who makes a living as a husband and father for several families, feels a growing attraction for one wife whose husband disappeared in Colombia’s violent past. The actor comes to question his identity, the widow hesitates between sharing a fiction or remaining alone. Can historical wounds be cured by collective narrative? the directors ask.
“Wood” stars Colombian actress Divina Blanco (“Orgullo Blanco”).
Barranquilla, on Colombia’s Atlantic seaboard, is the nearest big city to Aracateca, where Gabriel García Márquez spent his childhood. It shows. “Ramón Vinyes, the playwright, writer and inspirer of the wise Catalan bookseller character in ‘One Hundred Years of Solitude’ described Barranquilla as having an inexistent existence, only understood navigating avenues of dispersion and the labyrinths of memory,” the directors note. “‘What inhabits uninhabited places? What emotional residue survives? A place nourished by the tension of the real and imaginary, where surrealism co-exists with inevitable realism.”
“’Wood’ is our love letter to Barranquilla, in memory of our grandparents. A tribute to our roots, our essence, and our culture. It is a story about absences: of people, of history, of certainties. That is why this fiction is not built on facts, but rather on traversing the labyrinths of memory. Fiction fills the gaps of reality,” Heilbron noted.
The film “transcends geographical and cultural borders, offering an emotional and reflective center on solitude, absence and grief. It seeks to authentically capture these complex emotions –highly relatable to audiences – ultimately crystalizing into a time capsule that preserves part of our cultural memory,” added producer Alejandra Orjuela Caicedo.
The production houses behind “Wood” underscore the dramatic last-decade growth of Colombian filmmaking, bulwarked by stable government support and growth of local hubs outside Bogotá.
Founded in 2018 by Palacio and Heilbron, Civil Jornal produced their feature debut, “Lemonade, Lemonade,” about Mariana, caught in the limbo between university and adulthood, encountering people and facing an uncertain future. “Their works are non-aligned and economical, exploring microcosms that arise from and return to Caribbean existence,” they say of themselves.
Launched by Orjuela Caicedo in 2022, Innoctum Media is a creative studio and production house centring on auteur cinema and experimental narratives. Exploring and experimenting through storytelling that forges an identity for Colombia’s Caribbean region, Estuario Cine was established by Alberto de la Espriella and Antonio Camargo in 2022.
