Mudos testigos

Mudos testigos is both the first feature of critic, scriptwriter, and producer Jerónimo Atehortúa, and the posthumous work by Luis Ospina, a prolific and renowned figure in Latin-American cinema whose fiction, essay, and documentary work developed since the beginnings of the 1970s, with the collective known as Grupo de Cali [Cali Group], until his death in 2019. Taking as its starting point a dramatic love story initially narrated with classic melodrama codes and the formal resources of silent cinema, Mudos testigos breathes life into the images we still have today of the three first decades of Colombian cinema by relating them to various literary texts and bringing up, vehemently, the political and societal tensions of those days, which were often shown only as a background. Besides materializing the last project of Ospina, who was always concerned for preserving his country’s cinematic and cultural memory, here Atehortúa carries on with his own academic reflections on the work with archive material. In this film, thanks to the collage and a peculiarly plastic and expressive sound design, archive material displays its huge creative potential by using such diverse registers as the travel log, the socially and politically engaged cinema, and a tradition of experimental cinema. Using Atehortúa’s words, this film makes it clear, with commendable zest, that “the work with archive material is not in the archive itself, but outside of it, in the glance built around it.” Andrés Suárez