Luis Ospina (Part 1): It all started at the end

The well-known film director talks about the unsteady history of cinema in Colombia. Beginning in his native city of Cali he was part of the renaissance that began in the '60s with the Caliwood movement. He talks about thefine line in his work between fiction and documentary, described by the controversial term 'mockumentary'.

 Luis Ospina, who was deeply involved with the resurrection of cinema in Cali (Colombia) where it had begun in 1921, is looking back over the history of cinema since his first involvement in the 'Caliwood' movement in 1971. Colombia, of course, is no ordinary country, and the development of cinema has not been smooth: a repeated process of life - death, life - death as he puts it, where the State took a long time to offer effective support.

His own film-making leans towards documentary, but only leans, because he is fascinated by the fine line between fiction and documentary, and how cinema techniques can either reveal truth or hide it. In Caliwood, he was involved with two other creative people, film-maker Carlos Mayola (1945-2007) and writer Andres Caicedo (1951 - 1977), and one of Ospina and Mayolo's most influential films was ''Agarrando pueblo"  vampires of poverty, 197 criticizing the way European cinema was using Latin America as a source of 'poverty-porn'. He describes this film and the later ''A paper tiger" (2007) by the ambiguous term 'mockumentary', viewed negatively by some critics. Vampirism and cannibalism became important metaphors for capitalism in their approach to film-making at this time.

I met Luis after the showing of his film "Todo comenzo por el fin" (It all begins at the end), at the Ibero - American Film Festival in Lisbon. The film was conceived as a review of the history of Colombian film-making, but reality, in the form of a potentially fatal illness intervened and became interwoven with the story, which, "like all my films is a 'home - movie", he says. But it's a home movie which deals with some very un-homely topics and documents an important phase of cinema history in Colombia.

The full interview was first published in The Prisma Multicultural Newspaper in 2018, and can be read if full with accompanying photos here: https://theprisma.co.uk/2018/01/29/luis-ospina-part-1-it-all-begins-at-the-end/