Winner of the Golden Shell at the San Sebastian Film Festival in the autumn, this is the third feature film by Laura Mora, herself a victim of the violence that has bloodied her country for more than half a century.

"Colombia is a very complex country: there is this idea, especially in the most conservative circles, that we have to give a good image. But art doesn't have to," the filmmaker told AFP before presenting her film at the Cinelatino festival, scheduled until April 2 in Toulouse.

The daughter of a psychoanalyst and a lawyer, Laura Mora spent her teenage years in the 1990s in Medellin, one of the world's most dangerous cities, where drug lord Pablo Escobar spread terror and death.

She saw her father fall under the bullets of a hitman in 2002, when she was only 21 years old. Devastated by the pain, she went to Australia, studied cinema and began therapy.

The result will be "Matar a Jesus" (2019), a faithful account of the murder but inspired by a dream of the filmmaker, in which she meets the killer of her father.

Exorcising the death of the father

"Speaking through images has been my way of living because everything hurts me. I have experienced very painful things related to violence," says Laura Mora. It took him twelve years to shoot this film, acclaimed by critics and several awards around the world.

The investigation into his father's murder has still not been concluded. "Over the years, we realized that we would not know anything," laments the filmmaker, now 42 years old and returned to live in Medellin.

Colombian director Laura Mora (4th l) and the actors of the film "Los Reyes del Mundo", October 4, 2022 in Bogota © Raul ARBOLEDA / AFP / Archives

The success of his films abroad did nothing. "The relationship with people is changing, but on the state side, nothing has changed," she said.

With "Matar a Jesus" ("Kill Jesus" in English), she exorcised the violence suffered in her flesh. But instead of taking another course, she decided to deepen the theme with "Los reyes del Mundo" ("The Kings of the World").

"I finished +Matar a Jesus+ in 2016 and went to the coast, in the north of Colombia. I made the same journey that young people are undertaking in +Los reyes del Mundo+," she explains.

Dreams and delirium on the road

Ra, the protagonist of the film, receives an official letter informing him that he can demand the return of a plot confiscated years earlier by paramilitaries from his grandmother, since deceased.

He decides to go and assert his rights, accompanied by the only family he knows: Culebro, Sere, Winny and Nano, his street friends. These five young people were selected during a casting in the poor neighborhoods of Medellin.

Colombian director Laura Mora (c) receives the Golden Shell for her film "Los Reyes del Mundo", on September 24, 2022 at the San Sebastian Film Festival, Spain © ANDER GILLENEA / AFP/Archives

"From the beginning, the film is a road trip, a +road movie+ that disobeys the rules of the genre, that goes towards dreams and delirium," says Laura Mora.

"This is the story of young people who are rejected all the time. So it seemed to me that imagination was the only territory from which no one could expel them," she adds.

The problem of land and dispossession is at the heart of the Colombian conflict, between guerrillas, paramilitaries and the state.

Although Laura Mora has "not thought in terms of magical realism", dear in particular to the Colombian writer and Nobel laureate Gabriel Garcia Marquez, she admits to feeling "that magical realism is a very special way that we Latin Americans have to tell our stories, because the reality is so hard that we have to find beauty, if only in the narrative."

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