Superficies
Cristina Motta
Argentina, Colombia | 2021 | 10 min
World premiere
Language : Spanish
Subtitles : English, French
A camera. Landscapes in which dirt tracks barely hide the mass graves and in which the bodies of the “disappeared” flow down the river. With an incisive tone, Cristina Motta calls for the memory of the people who fell victim to the violence in Argentina and Colombia, two territories she holds dear.
Cristina Motta’s images poignantly reflect a still festering wound in Latin America, that of the trauma of the kidnapped and “disappeared” people, victims of violence, be it of political, armed or misogynous nature. Through intelligent and implacable writing, revealed in an incisive tone, the denunciation of the events is built around an understated and concise description of natural elements—earth, water, stone—perpetually mirrored with this violent past. Here we find an apparent balance with the elements of our daily life alongside life and death. By evoking the rationality of the organisation of the cemeteries, the surface of which is made of “traditions, choices, or simply possibilities”, and by highlighting their harmony, constructed of stones and rituals, the director points out the unbearable injustice of hundreds of bodies buried on the Medellín hillside or that of the thousands of “disappeared” thrown alive from military planes into the Rio de la Plata during the Argentine dictatorship.
Javier Martín
