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Nuria, 12, and Fabio, 9, arrive with their mother on the island of Fantasia, in the middle of the Amazon, fleeing the armed conflict in Colombia. An island where live and dead coexist. pyramidefilms.com/

The film " Los silencios " by Brazilian director Beatriz Seigner will be released this Wednesday, April 3, on screens in France. Selected in 2018 at Horizontes latinos de San Sebastián and at the Cannes Fortnight, it is a film that literally navigates between the real and the fantastic, where dead and alive cohabit, where the victims and the survivors of the war in Colombia seek forgiveness and forgiveness.

A boat slides on the river. Croaking frogs, rippling water, screeching of insects. It's dark. The water and the river are ubiquitous in Beatriz Seigner's film. Normal, the action takes place on an island, regularly submerged by the waves of the Amazon, on the triple border between Brazil, Colombia and Peru. But water also has a very strong symbolic. In all cultures, water is the principle of life, a symbol of fertility and purification. But the water is also dormant or dead. It is the clear spring that irrigates the land, grows vegetables and fruits, but also the dark Styx on which Charon the ferryman carries the souls of the dead who will have a burial in Greek mythology.

Los silencios, film by Beatriz Seigner: The river is above all a source of nourishment and a source of life: little Flavio, who has become the man of the house, wants to help his mother to provide for their needs. pyramidefilms.com/

Amparo and her two children, Flavio, a mischievous mischievous boy, and Nuria, a mute groom with big, frightened eyes, land on the island where they are greeted by an elderly aunt. We learn very quickly the story of Amparo against the backdrop of the radio narrative of peace negotiations with the FARC guerrillas in Havana. This is the first part of the story, which sets the scene. Her husband, Adam, and his daughter disappeared, swept away by a landslide, in a region where guerrillas and paramilitaries in the service of an oil company clash. Wife of a guerrilla, threatened with death, Amparo had to seek refuge on this small aquatic territory which does not belong to any State, while waiting a hypothetical reception in Brazil.

Amparo is doing as well as she can: she can not be a fisherwoman because she is afraid of water, so she will be a porter, a man's job, carrying heavy bales of frozen fish; lack of money to pay for the search for bodies, she must give up her right to compensation for her missing relatives to a lawyer; like all moms, she fights with her kid to make him listen to reason. She is in survival strategies like all displaced people in all the conflicts of the world and evolves, like many Colombians, among the ghosts of her disappeared. Silent presences that invite each other to the table, a consoling caress with an absent reflection in the mirror, the memory of a tender gesture ... Intimate scenes beautifully interpreted and filmed. Nocturnal sequences, lit by the candle or fire of the stove as if the warmth and softness of their light on the coppery skins could rebuild this destroyed family.

Adam and Amparo, a couple destroyed by armed violence in Colombia and magnificently portrayed by Marleyda Soto and Brazilian comedian Enrique Diaz. pyramidefilms.com/

Amparo, performed by Colombian actress Marleyda Soto, whom we had already seen in La tierra y la sombra , is a magnificent and modest mother of courage. A snapshot of the news: a television series in which a representative of FARC in Havana explains the role of women in building peace. It is surrounded by actors most often non-professionals, the inhabitants of this isla Fantasia, coveted by real estate developers. An island populated by ghosts, blows her friend to little Nuria. The two girls slip in secret, at night and by boat, to a meeting of these ghosts. " It is to talk about the peace treaty and know what the dead think ," says the child. Living and disappeared meet in a village assembly, face camera, to discuss the forgiveness, the pain of those who remain, the suffering of those who died away from theirs. Who is what? " On behalf of the living, I would like to know what you need to be at peace, " asks Amparo's old aunt to the dead.

The deep black waters of the Amazon may be able to close the wounds. Nuria and her father will have a burial. " To all those who will fight before us and to all those who will fight after, " posed in the form of epitaph the director Beatriz Seigner. A film in which the fantastic - beautiful find that these fluorescences which are adorned the dead - softens the cruelty of the real. A tale of water and emotions, between the silence forced by those whom the war has silenced and the painful silence of those who have lost everything.