The films of Ciro Guerra and the making of cosmopolitan spaces in Colombian cinema

Abstract

This article proposes to use the concept of “cosmopolitan cinematic margins” to analyse the paradoxical meeting of the cosmopolitan meaning and discourses of Ciro Guerra’s Colombian films and the spatial restrictions and immobility of the rural and remote places in which they are set. Such areas as seen on screen are usually interpreted by urban audiences as exotic locations, independently of their actual distance from cities. The article explores how films that, at first sight, show images of marginal and remote places like the Colombian Amazonian Jungle, when inserted into a global context—such as the hierarchical system of international film festivals—become symbols of cosmopolitan cinematic margins, and represent a country in the global spaces that legitimise the importance of that country’s film production. The cosmopolitan cinematic margins in the films of Guerra are then strategically situated in environments of global mobility and international prestige.

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© Maria Luna and Philippe Meers.
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-NonCommercial-NoDerivatives 4.0 International License.
The Films of Ciro Guerra and the Making of
Cosmopolitan Spaces in Colombian Cinema
Maria Luna and Philippe Meers
Abstract: This article proposes to use the concept of “cosmopolitan cinematic margins” to analyse the
paradoxical meeting of the cosmopolitan meaning and discourses of Ciro Guerra’s Colombian films and
the spatial restrictions and immobility of the rural and remote places in which they are set. Such areas as
seen on screen are usually interpreted by urban audiences as exotic locations, independently of their
actual distance from cities. The article explores how films that, at first sight, show images of marginal
and remote places like the Colombian Amazonian Jungle, when inserted into a global context—such as
the hierarchical system of international film festivals—become symbols of cosmopolitan cinematic
margins, and represent a country in the global spaces that legitimise the importance of that country’s film
production. The cosmopolitan cinematic margins in the films of Guerra are then strategically situated in
environments of global mobility and international prestige.
Introduction
The three feature films directed thus far by Colombian filmmaker Ciro Guerra—
Wandering Shadows (La sombra del caminante, 2004), The Wind Journeys (Los viajes del
viento, 2009) and Embrace of the Serpent (El abrazo de la serpiente, 2015)— were all produced
by the independent production house Ciudad Lunar. They show the dynamics and tensions in the
making of a cosmopolitan cinematic space within a peripheral cinema or “small cinema”,
expressions that will be used in this article to remark the particular position of the cinemas of the
“remaining countries” beyond the dominant production of Argentina, Mexico and Brazil—also
known as “the big three” (Falicov and Middents 115). All three films were presented at Cannes
Film Festival, and Embrace of the Serpent enjoyed a noteworthy global success, becoming the
first Colombian film to be nominated for an Academy Award for Best Foreign Film.
In order to analyse the role of international film festivals as showcases of diversity, in
which the margins become spaces of global legitimisation for Colombian cinema, this article
addresses cosmopolitanism as a multidimensional concept built from the perspective of a critical
and situated cosmopolitanism. As Gerard Delanty states, a critical cosmopolitanism allows for
the examination of the encounter between local and global expressions; according to Walter
Mignolo, such notion, rather than defining cosmopolitanism as a universal project, should be
understood through the idea of “diversality” (743), or the possibility of rethinking the universal
by considering a diversity of logics and dynamics, especially from those who are in a marginal
condition. The conception of cosmopolitanism adopted here also follows Nina Glick Schiller and
Andrew Irving, who conceive it as an element rooted in territories and people and that is situated

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in particular contexts, which, according to Felicia Chan, in the case of film depends on its
material conditions and social context.
In particular, the idea of cosmopolitan cinematic margins proposed in this article is
constructed from the observation of a concrete situation in Colombian cinema, namely the gaze
of urban directors who work with (and on) marginal or rural territories of the country, and the
capacity of Colombian remote places and, by extension, the communities that inhabit them to
gain visibility within international arenas of film appreciation and consumption.
The first part of the article looks at interdisciplinary theories of situated and critical
cosmopolitanism in order to construct and introduce the concept of cosmopolitan cinematic
margins. The question of cosmopolitan margins is developed as an original contribution to the
current debates on cosmopolitan cinema, in which neglected film geographies, such as those of
Colombian cinema, are gaining attention. This approach to cosmopolitan cinematic margins,
then, implies a transition from exoticism (seen from the outside, as in the gaze of urban directors
upon rural territories) to cosmopolitanism (the capacity of belonging everywhere, as in the
capacity of the films to gain visibility at international festivals).
1
The concept, we contend, is in
fact very useful on more than one level: not only to interpret a film’s content, narrative and style
but also, and more importantly, to shed light on the changing situation of Colombian
contemporary cinema and its current position within the space of international film festivals. The
second part of the article focuses on Ciro Guerra’s works, tracing his journeys as an emergent
director through the film festivals of San Sebastián and Cannes, and highlighting the importance
of his depiction of remote locations and their exhibition in the film festival circuit. In this article,
Cannes is presented as a dreamland and a space of legitimisation for emergent directors, that
contributes to the national political goal of the construction of a positive image of Colombia in
the world.
The article analyses different types or levels of margins in relation to cosmopolitanism.
On one level, margins will be seen as territories: remote places at the edges of a nation that
temporarily occupy a central space due to their representation in film and their visibility via
international exhibition. On a second level, they will be seen in terms of their position within the
global film market and culture as, historically, Colombian films have been marginal on account
of their production within a small cinema, and peripheral in terms of their exhibition at
international film festivals. In this sense, the margins of the country, urban and rural territories
that are habitually forgotten (both socially and in terms of cinematic representation), are re-
evaluated through the filter of an external global gaze cast upon artistic creations. In order to
define the idea of cosmopolitan cinematic margins, the main questions to be addressed consist in
how the margins of a nation are strategically screened within global arenas of film appreciation
and consumption, and how they determine the construction of a cosmopolitan imaginary of a
fragmented and centralised nation historically enclosed in its own borders.
Cosmopolitan Cinematic Margins
The perspectives of critical and situated cosmopolitanism help to contextualise the idea of
cosmopolitan cinematic margins, exploring its potentialities as a tool of analysis. The
development of this operational concept is useful to understand the appeal of remote locations

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for international screenings. It also supports an understanding of how film’s cosmopolitanism is
being influenced by local or national production practices and by cultural policies. In this article,
as mentioned, the analysis is exemplified by the case of Ciro Guerra, one of the most
representative directors of a new Colombian cinema that, we argue, is focused on the making of
new cosmopolitan spaces.
Critical cosmopolitanism, seen from the viewpoint of “cultural modes of mediation”,
emphasises “moments of world openness created out of the encounter of the local with the
global” (Delanty 27). The approach of critical cosmopolitanism shows that the classical idea of
cosmopolitanism can be linked to a colonial view of the “discovery” of the other, an issue that is
also the main point of postcolonial theory’s reaction to a homogeneous idea of modernity. The
critique of a homogeneous modernity opens up the possibility of understanding cosmopolitanism
in terms of a true “globalization from below”, conceived from a “subaltern perspective”, and that
aims to construct “diversality” or “diversity as a universal project” (Mignolo 745, 743).
Formulated in opposition to universality, this approach advocates the existence of diverse forms
of cosmopolitanism that challenge the modern project of the Western world. Critical
cosmopolitanism, thus, allows us to understand cosmopolitanism as a multidimensional
concept—this is “border thinking, critical and dialogical” (Mignolo 744). Border thinking,
according to Mignolo, is a “tool of critical cosmopolitanism” (736) which recognises the
participation of subaltern agents that take an active role in the making of cosmopolitan projects.
The question of how this dialogical concept can be applied to issues of representation,
production and distribution in Colombian cinema is key to comprehend the making of
cosmopolitanism from the perspective of a small cinema in transformation.
Recent studies on situated cosmopolitanism “recognize that people’s actions are rooted in
their corporeal being”, which emphasises the materiality of its places and conditions (Glick
Schiller and Irving 4). David Thompson, for instance, in his review of ethnographies of urban
poverty of marginalised communities in different parts of Latin America, conceives
cosmopolitanism as “a series of material identities and relationships that develop within the
context of economic and social inequality in both local and global scales” (59). Connected to
particular global imaginaries, situated cosmopolitanism in his study is addressed as the ability of
marginal communities to inhabit the world from which they are excluded. Revisiting the theory
of hybrid cultures and identities proposed by Néstor García Canclini, Thompson defines situated
cosmopolitanism in Latin America as a “transgressive practice caught between local conflicts
and global cosmopolitics” (73).
2
Along the same lines, a situated cosmopolitanism perspective
within film festival research could observe how people move in different spaces, such as in film
productions set in remote locations, or in the transnational spaces of film festivals. A situated
cosmopolitanism will allow tracing distances and relationships between the inhabitants of remote
or marginal communities and film directors as artists and distant observers.
Current sociological and cultural approaches to the concept of cosmopolitanism suggest
that it would be more productive to study cosmopolitanism in a situated context, rather than as an
abstract or global-neutral idea (Glick-Schiller and Irving). In film studies, Sean Cubitt addresses
the cosmopolitan film as a type of film that is able to capture global audiences. Felicia Chan in
her critique to Cubitt’s perspective points out that one of the main problems of framing
cosmopolitan cinema in a nonsituated form, such as global consumption, is that it undermines

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cosmopolitanism’s potential for cultural critique. Chan discusses the interpretation of
cosmopolitan films as a “new form of universalism which accepts the totalizing drive of
modernity”, arguing in favour of the inclusion of its material dimensions:
While cinema’s imaginative possibilities enable the spectator to enter new “worlds”, it is
equally important to consider the industrial and commercial structures that make these
crossings possible. The interpellation of both the affective and material dimensions of
cinema allows us to explore the complex relationship between the materiality of
cosmopolitan practice and its romantic aspirations. (188)
To understand the cosmopolitan film space in its material dimensions implies going
beyond textual, narrative or representational approaches, by which films can be considered
cosmopolitan only in terms of representation, characters or themes. Recent publications on
cosmopolitanism and cinema point out the importance of the former as an analytical tool;
however, their contribution still privileges narrative as the main category to access cosmopolitan
manifestations in film. The analysis of Celestino Deleyto of “how films produce meaning in our
globalized society” is an example of this focus on narrative (1). Also Maria Rovisco’s suggestion
that “more attention should be paid to visual representations of borders and mobility as one goes
on to probe the category of cosmopolitan cinema” falls in this category (153). This article, on the
contrary, by developing the concept of cosmopolitan cinematic margins aims to show that
cosmopolitan cinema is much more than the subject of film storytelling. The concept, indeed, has
the potential to be very productive in the analysis of film production, distribution and exhibition.
The “cartographies of communication and culture” perspective proposed by Jesús Martín-
Barbero provides a useful starting point for a definition of the concept of cosmopolitan cinematic
margins (292). It expresses the need to connect the margins between them, with the intention to
highlight the social relevance of alternative spaces in a global context of communication and
culture. As Martín-Barbero writes, “[t]his is what has been expressed in recent years by the
tendency to ask questions that go beyond the ‘diurnal logic’ and deterritorialization. It implies
taking the margins, not as a subject, but as a catalyst element” (292; authors’ translation). In our
interpretation, the expression “catalyst element” that Martín-Barbero uses to define the
importance of margins highlights their relevance for Colombian cinema and society, not only as
subjects of film textual analysis, but also because margins have the capacity to subvert power
relations in the cultural system.
With reference to an interdisciplinary approach to film studies, Martín-Barbero’s theory
on the mediation of communication and culture clearly resonates with Michael Chanan’s
reflections on redefining the militant character of Third Cinema as a need for “a new geography”
in which margins are interconnected globally (387). In both Martín-Barbero’s and Chanan’s
perspectives, the relevance of margins as places of political signification reconfigures the view of
territories—a view that, far from being neutral, highlights the importance of analysing the
concrete spaces in which cinema and communication take place.
By focusing on a single filmmaker, Ciro Guerra, this article follows a methodological
strategy that allows a detailed analysis of the trajectory of an emergent director at the Cannes
Film Festival. A number of Colombian fiction films of the last decade shot in rural locations

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were screened and received prizes at international festivals, including Crab Trap (El vuelco del
cangrejo, Óscar Ruíz Navia, 2010), Porfirio (Alejandro Landes, 2011), La Playa DC (Juan
Andrés Arango, 2012), The Towrope (La sirga, William Vega, 2012), and Land and Shade (La
tierra y la sombra, César Acevedo, 2015), the latter being the first Colombian film to be awarded
the Camera D’Or at Cannes Film Festival. These films are good examples of how rural margins
and their characters, as depicted by young Colombian directors, have gained visibility at
international screenings.
Recent research on coproductions in Latin America also focuses on ideas of new film
geographies. For instance, Stephanie Dennison highlights the importance of the increasing
volume of Latin American films that rely on coproduction as a financing mechanism. Deborah
Shaw suggests studying coproductions as “transnational modes of production, distribution and
exhibition” in a category that “clearly links financing with content” (52). Tamara Falicov refers
to coproductions as a “technical artistic subcategory”, focusing on the influential role of the fund
Ibermedia in the construction of an Ibero-American transnational market (“Ibero-Latin” 71).
Luisela Alvaray, in turn, analyses how the growing exchanges between the film industries of the
United States, Europe and Latin America should be mapped as a new “transnational geography”
(“Are We Global” 84). In a recent publication, Alvaray also points out the paradox of national
cinema laws that promote coproduction “as they invite foreign investments to partake in the
creation of local products” (“Transnational Network” 259). All in all, the recent scholarship in
the subfield of how coproductions work in the Latin American region shows the usefulness of a
perspective on critical and situated cosmopolitanism given the challenges that the concept of
transnational cinema poses to the study of national cinemas.
Finally, the recent development of film festival studies as an interdisciplinary field of
research has shown that the origin of film festivals is a cosmopolitan European invention (de
Valck; Iordanova). This field of study includes new approaches to the internationalisation of
small and emergent cinemas in Latin America, in which film festival funds are considered
“cultural intermediaries” (Falicov, “Festival Film” 209). For example, Latin American countries,
such as Chile and Colombia, today promote national policies to foster the transnational visibility
of their cinemas. In the case of Colombia, the presence of several films in recent international
and recognised European film festivals occurs within a changing media policy context, more
specifically the implementation of cinema laws (814/2003 and 1156/2012) that encourage the
internationalisation of Colombian cinema. All in all, the position of world cinema in film
festivals contributes to a display of diversity (Chan) and, as the case of Ciro Guerra will show,
might create new geographies of prestige around these cinemas.
A Cosmopolitan Route to Cannes: The Films of Ciro Guerra
Ciro Guerra’s feature film productions are revealing cases of the transnationalisation of
contemporary Colombian cinema (Luna). Previous studies of Colombian cinema culture provide
the necessary backdrop to an interpretation of Colombian cinema as a small cinema within the
conceptual framework of cosmopolitan cinematic margins. For instance, Juana Suárez’s analysis
of “capturing the margin” reflects on the representation of the other, “those who live in marginal
urban areas, at the fringes of the law or at the edges of capitalist production” (69). Carolina

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Sourdis and Andrés Pedraza in a recent article focused on Wandering Shadows discuss how
marginal productions are being absorbed by official institutions. Our article extends this work
and contributes to the analysis of Guerra’s oeuvre by deconstructing the paradox of a
cosmopolitan space produced in the (Colombian) margins to be exhibited in the (global) centres
of world cinema, of which Cannes is a privileged space of exhibition.
The analysis proposed below is divided into two parts: the first, entitled “Colombia as
Location”, surveys the visual poetics of Guerra’s films in relation to their place of production,
while “Cannes as a Passport to the World Cinema Dreamland” explores the recent history of the
Colombian presence in what is arguably the most prestigious European film festival. The
locations generate a specific kind of storytelling connected to mysterious and magical places, but
equally stimulate the generation of a state branding. Cultural institutions of the state, such as the
Proimágenes Colombia and the Ministry of Culture of Colombia, promote a positive image of
the country. Both cultural institutions display the quality of the films funded by public money in
film festivals as an asset to attract foreign film investments.
Colombia as Location
We distinguish three major aspects of Guerra’s films that establish a link between the
space of production and the space of the storytelling: first, the visual poetics used by the director,
which is based on the natural characteristics of real locations; second, the recurrent figure of the
traveller, which functions as a connecting character; third, the remote locations depicted in the
films, which we analyse as examples of cosmopolitan cinematic margins when screened at
international film festivals.
The conditions of film production in remote or marginal places of Colombia, in both
urban and rural settings, constitute challenges that inspire the spatial production of Guerra’s
cinematic discourse. The director carefully mixes natural and artificial light in the stylised
photography of real places that characterises all his cinematography. The labyrinthine cities, lost
swamps and endless rivers depicted in his films constitute a visual poetics of the margins. Spaces
such as the deprived neighbourhood that still survives in the middle of Bogota in Wandering
Shadows, the small hidden villages within the immense landscape of the swamps of Ciénaga
Grande del Magdalena in The Wind Journeys, or the riversides of the Amazon Jungle that traces
the routes of the explorers in Embrace of the Serpent all work as visual metaphors that contain a
nostalgic element of “lost places”. These elements, if interpreted according to Martín-Barbero’s
ideas, connect with the audience, depicting the margins “not only as a subject” but also as “a
catalyst element” (292). In this sense, the aestheticised natural locations in Guerra’s visual
poetics can be interpreted as utopian projections in which the margins recover their importance.
In this visual poetics, the margins are more than the subject of storytelling, as they also feed
artistic expressions of a national cinematography that (temporarily) resituates marginal locations,
following Serje, from geographical isolation to the imaginary of a centralised but fragmented
nation.
At first sight, the two most recent films of Ciro Guerra could be interpreted as depicting
exotic locations. The Caribbean swamps of The Wind Journeys or the Amazon Jungle of

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Embrace of the Serpent seem like postcard landscapes of Colombia. Nevertheless, in each of his
films the storytelling is also deeply connected to the real location and its inhabitants. For
example, the films are multilingual as they include different languages spoken by Indigenous
tribes. When these films are inserted into global spaces of exhibition, such as international film
festivals, the remote locations become examples of cosmopolitan cinematic margins. In other
words, the margins depicted in the films of Guerra undergo a process of transition from
exoticism to cosmopolitanism. Exoticism is here understood as the cultural and aesthetic
fascination of both urban directors and international audiences with remote locations, while
cosmopolitanism represents the possibility of stimulating encounters between local and global
cultural and geographical expressions. The presence of Guerra’s oeuvre and of the films’
protagonists in the film festival circuit is necessary for such transition to take place.
Following the ideas of Mignolo on diversality as opposed to universality, then, the
centrality of Ciro Guerra to the spaces of world cinema in film festivals could be interpreted as a
cosmopolitanism from below. In Guerra’s films, the presence of the Indigenous language and the
work with traditional communities (present in his films as nonprofessional actors) are central to
the generation of cosmopolitan cinematic margins. Thus, this encounter of the local with the
global generates interesting questions on the shifting geometries of power in which the margins
are temporarily incorporated into cosmopolitan screenings.
Cannes: A Passport to the World Cinema Dreamland
When we use the concept of cosmopolitan margins at the level of spaces of funding and
exhibition, film festivals are a crucial area for analysis. The regular presence of Colombia in the
top tier European film festivals, particularly in Cannes, is recent and can be traced back to 2007,
when Colombia was selected as one of the countries to represent Latin America in the 2009
section Tous les Cinémas du Monde (All the Cinemas in the World).
3
At this time, seven
Colombian productions were exhibited in different sections, including Wandering Shadows, and
the film project—then in progress—of The Wind Journeys was presented in L’Atelier section of
the Cinéfondation. As Julián David Correa stated, the presence of Colombia in the section Tous
les Cinémas du Monde goes beyond the “discovery” of a small cinema from a peripheral
country. Rather, it was an interinstitutional effort, which involved governmental lobbies and
coordinated strategies among cultural institutions from France and Colombia.
In the history of Colombian cinema, there have been some isolated cases of films selected
for Cannes. Examples include A Man of Principles (Cóndores no entierran todos los días,
Francisco Norden, 1984), in competition for Un Certain Regard in 1984, when the prize was
awarded to Wim Wenders’s Paris, Texas (1984), and No Future (Rodrigo D: No futuro, 1990)
and The Rose Seller (La vendedora de rosas, 1998), two films by Víctor Gaviria. Gaviria was the
only Colombian director twice selected for the official competition of the Palme d’Or, in 1990
and 1998, years in which Wild at Heart (David Lynch, 1990) and Life is Beautiful (La vita è
bella, Roberto Begnini, 1998), two films produced within strong film industries, were the award
winners.
4
In contrast, Gaviria’s films are prime examples of small cinema, shot in the Comunas
of Medellín, a place affected by different forms of urban violence, with nonprofessional actors,
and produced within a precarious institutional film structure. Their presence in the official

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Cannes competition was all the more relevant as remarkable examples of a Colombian cinematic
tradition of representing the margins.
Despite the case of Gaviria, it is a challenge to trace a clear lineage in Colombian cinema
due to its highly fragmented history.
5
The films of Ciro Guerra are a recent example of the
potential of a cinema that originated in the margins. Guerra, who started as a student in film and
media schools and who later obtained state support for the production of his second film under
the Colombian Cinema Law (814/2003), opened a pioneering route to Cannes that later became
common to other young filmmakers in Colombia, such as the directors of films for the Contravía
production house.
6
This trajectory is partly the result of a state programme that supports the
production and internationalisation of Colombian cinema and promotes the discovery, training
and financial support of young talents, many of them educated in the public film and media
schools of Colombia.
In fact, Guerra’s opera prima was a student experiment, born in the classrooms of the
Universidad Nacional de Colombia, the oldest and most traditional film school in the country.
The production of Wandering Shadows began without state support, before the renovation of
Colombian cinema policies. Nevertheless, the project was presented in the Co-Production Forum
at the San Sebastián Film Festival in Spain, and received the Cine en Construcción award, a very
prestigious recognition in the Ibero-American world. The experimental black-and-white film also
won the Audience Award at Cine Latino in Toulouse, after which it was screened at fifty-two
film festivals around the world (Rueda). Even if in the beginning Wandering Shadows did not
receive official support, the Ministry of Culture of Colombia included it as one of the main films
in its 2007 showcase of the diversity of Colombian cinema in Cannes. Carolina Sourdis and
Andrés Pedraza highlight the fact that the film, one of the most remarkable visual experiments in
the national cinematography, results from a mode of production that started in the margins.
Suárez, on the other hand, points to the recognition by national media that paradoxically related
the film to the promulgation of the Cinema Law in 2003 (167). Even though it started as an
outsider, the film was thus strategically reabsorbed as a prime example of emergent Colombian
cinema, but only after gaining international recognition.
Two years after its screening at the Cinéfondation’s Atelier in Cannes, The Wind
Journeys, Guerra’s second project, became the first major Colombian coproduction supported by
the Cinema Law (814/2003).
7
Cofunded by Colombia, Germany, Argentina and the
Netherlands,
8
the film was selected in the competitive section of Un Certain Regard.
9
The
director’s statement for the 62nd Cannes competition presented the film as “[a] journey towards
the beginning, towards the spirit. Towards our soul. For centuries we asked ourselves: what
keeps us apart, now it is time to ask what brings us together” (“Cinefoundation”). The director’s
speech in Cannes may be read in terms of a critical cosmopolitanism because it expresses both
the need for diversality and a will to connect his stories to the sensibility of Western audiences—
a cultural mediation in terms of Gerard Delanty. The film finally received a side prize in the
festival: the award of the city of Rome for its “ability to give the audience an unprecedented
journey of discovery and an initiation of [sic] Colombia’s diversity” (“Los Viajes”). However,
on a national level, the recognition of the first large-scale production of Ciudad Lunar in Cannes
was framed as a successful example of the impact of the Cinema Law 814/2003. Colombia was

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now able to produce high-quality films with which it entered the circuit of film festivals, with
Cannes as the ultimate dreamland.
Embrace of the Serpent is the third production by Ciro Guerra. The Oscar-nominated film
focusing on the stories of Indigenous communities from the viewpoint of Western explorers
seemed to be one of the Cinema Development Fund’s (Fondo de Desarrollo Cinematográfico–
FDC) productions that could attract European coproduction funds. However, as in the previous
experience of Wandering Shadows, the director undertook a riskier black-and-white experiment,
this time a production in the Amazon Jungle. Guerra’s idea of reproducing the light of the old
pictures encountered in the diaries of the ethnographers of the nineteenth century in Colombia
was a challenge that required a larger budget than his first independent production filmed in the
centre of Bogota. Despite the success of The Wind Journeys, the new project did not easily
obtain international support from European coproduction partners. The production house Ciudad
Lunar then forged a Latin American coproduction between Colombia, Venezuela and Argentina.
The film was also made in association with Caracol, one of the main private television channels
in the country, and obtained the support of the Rotterdam Hubert Bals Fund, INCAA and
Ibermedia. Although Embrace of the Serpent was not selected for the official competition at the
Cannes Film Festival, it was part of the parallel section Quinzaine des Réalisateurs (Director’s
Fortnight), organised in Cannes by the Societé du Réalisateurs de Films since 1969, where it
received the Art Cinema Award.
10
The most important recognition arrived at the end of its
festival tour, when Embrace of the Serpent became the first Colombian film ever nominated in
the Academy Award competition for Foreign Language Films.
Thanks to the selection of his films by Cannes, and the nomination for the Academy
Award in 2015, Ciro Guerra is probably the most internationally recognised Colombian director
of the moment due to his presence in film festival circuits and his re-evaluation of situated
histories of marginal communities. In the photos of the award ceremony, he is wearing a T-shirt
with a feather print collar under his black jacket, perhaps as an ironic homage to traditional
Indigenous cultures (Figure 1). Antonio Bolívar (Karamakate), on the other hand, one of the
Indigenous protagonists of Embrace of the Serpent, is wearing an authentic Amazonian symbol
on his head that accompanies his suit (Figure 2). Beyond the anecdote, the images are, of course,
a reference to the filmic discourse, but they also allow an interpretation of the distance between
the director and the nonprofessional actors—in this case, the people from the Indigenous
communities of Colombian Amazonia that participated in the film. Antonio Bolívar (Tiapuyama,
as he is known among the Ocaina Indigenous community) travelled to Los Angeles for the first
time from his home in Leticia, the capital of the Amazon municipality in Colombia. During the
moments prior to the ceremony, his words, in Spanish, were translated by the director for a
seemingly moved global audience. In his ten-year film career, the director was successful in
elaborating a discourse on the rescue of traditions and origins, such as in The Wind Journeys, in
which he depicted the landscape and music of his native town, Riosucio, in the north of
Colombia. However, in his latest film, he seems to be aware that these traditions are, to a great
extent, as unknown to him as an urban director as they are to the audience that carefully listened
to Tiapuyama, both in Cannes and at the Academy Award Ceremony. In this sense, a close
reading of the scene is meaningful, because it clearly embodies two different levels of
cosmopolitanism, one connecting urban directors with global audiences and another, even more
interesting, revealing a cosmopolitanism from below that facilitates the presence of local

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communities in transnational spaces. The question of how they could use a new space to
strategically position their visibility and current struggles that are taking place in the margins of a
global world should be a matter of further studies on cosmopolitan cinema.
Figure 1 (above): Ciro Guerra wearing a T-shirt with a feather print collar at the
2015 Academy Award ceremony. Photo: AP. Source: Revista Arcadia.
Figure 2 (below): Antonio Bolívar (Karamakate in Ciro Guerra’s Embrace of the Serpent) wearing an
authentic Amazonian symbol at the same ceremony. Source: Reporteros Asociados.

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Towards a Framework for Cosmopolitan Margins
From the perspective of critical and situated cosmopolitanism, a cosmopolitan
perspective in film studies is best understood as interdisciplinary. Therefore, this kind of research
asks for a contextual/situated approach that allows cosmopolitanism to be addressed in terms of
the mediation of margins. In the analysis of new film geographies, cosmopolitanism deals with
the transformations and challenges that affect national cinemas today, in an environment in
which global exhibition adds a seal of prestige to cinemas that traditionally were invisible in the
spaces of international film festivals or global competitions. Moreover, applying the concept of
cosmopolitan cinematic margins to the study of small cinemas delivers more productive
interpretations for contemporary issues such as coproductions, international training,
international funding and national film policies related to the international circulation of cultural
products. Coproductions can lead to the transformation of (national) film discourses. Thus, the
choice of a filmmaker like Ciro Guerra implies a switch from a more experimental and urban
mode of storytelling towards a strategy rooted in recounting local stories from within premodern
or “lost” settings. This nostalgia for lost places can be critically interpreted as the creation of
utopias that neutralise political discussion in strategic fields in Colombia, such as ecology or
armed conflict issues. Nevertheless, the other side of the neutralisation opens the possibility of
dialogues with diverse audiences and circuits that seem receptive of forms of alternative
cosmopolitanism.
Colombian cinema as a peripheral film industry or small cinema has been traditionally
excluded from the main film festival circuit. However, its current position is shifting, in
particular due to a recent successful strategy of international exhibition, encouraged by new
national cinema policies. Partly as a result of the implementation of a new cinema law, a
peripheral cinema is now more present in the cosmopolitan spaces of the main international film
festivals. In the end, these policies construct a discourse that redefines Colombian cinema as a
new cinema that emerges from the margins and fulfils the expectations of world cinema critics
and curators of European film festivals. Cosmopolitan cinematic margins at a national level are
thus strategically occupying positions in the peripheries of the global system of film festivals;
this international presence serves as a space for national legitimisation and is inevitably
transforming the landscape of production of contemporary Colombian cinema.
A critical, situated cosmopolitanism, in this sense, stimulates an emergent film industry
traditionally enclosed within its own borders. However, there remains a stark contrast between
the lack of foreign contact and restricted mobility of the Colombian rural inhabitants represented
in the films and the position of film directors and producers, who base most of their cultural
prestige on international success. How can we explain that a Colombian cinema, beyond its
national identity, defines itself on the basis of foreign/global recognition? What then is the
meaning of a cosmopolitan film in a country with a history of spatial restrictions and immobility
of the rural zones due to the armed conflict and social inequalities? The preliminary explorations
in this article point to a situated cosmopolitanism, materialised in the universalisation of local
stories and the projection of marginal places, as a first step towards a broader framework for
analysis of small cinemas in Latin America.

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Notes
1
A first discussion of these ideas was developed in Maria Luna’s article “Los Viajes
Transnacionales del Cine Colombiano”, a reflection on the documentary impulse and the
tensions between exoticism and cosmopolitanism present in the glocal character of new
Colombian coproductions.
2
The discussion of the term “cosmopolitics” to which Thompson briefly refers at the end of his
text exceeds the scope of this article. See Latour for a fruitful discussion based on Stenberg’s
definition of the word, which takes the stronger meaning of cosmos (universal) and the stronger
meanings of politics (pertaining to the polis/city-State) to argue that cosmopolitics indicates a
hesitation on the meaning of belonging to a common world.
3
This is a space created in 2005, as Benjamin Craig maintains, “to help showcase films from
countries with a historically low cinematic output” (65), or to promote diversity in cinema from
“countries with policies that support the national film industry”, according to the archives of
Proimágenes and the Presidency of Colombia (Proimágenes Colombia).
4
Rodrigo García was the only Colombian director that in the year 2000 won the prize Un Certain
Regard in Cannes, but his film Things You Can Tell Just by Looking at Her (2000), originally in
English, is a US/German coproduction not classified as a Colombian film.
5
As this article is focused on fiction films and their presence in Cannes, we will not make
reference to documentary films, through which directors such as Luis Ospina and Marta
Rodríguez have contributed to militant cinema and aesthetic innovation in the Colombian
cinematography.
6
This is the case of Ciudad Lunar, which produced Wandering Shadows, the opera prima of Ciro
Guerra, when the director was a student of cinematography at Universidad Nacional de
Colombia. Oscar Ruiz Navia, director of Crab Trap and founder of Contravía Films, and César
Acevedo, director of Land and Shade, the first Colombian Caméra D’Or at Cannes, were also
students of Universidad del Valle, the biggest public university in Cali.
7
The Cinema Law 814/2003 (Ley de cine) introduced by the Ministry of Culture of Colombia
encourages the activity of film production and film coproduction, particularly through the
creation of the Cinema Development Fund (Fondo de Desarrollo Cinematográfico–FDC).
8
The Wind Journeys was made in association with the television channels Arte, ZDF and RCN
Cine, and with the support of international institutions such as the World Cinema Fund,
Programa Ibermedia, the Hubert Bals Fund and the Rotterdam Film Fund. At the local level, it
received the support of Universidad Nacional de Colombia and the government of El Cesar, the
municipality of Colombia in which it was filmed.
9
Created in 1978 to absorb several ambiguous sidebars, Un Certain Regard is now, according to
Craig, the main showcase section of the festival and is intended to be a “survey of current world

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cinema” (65). In recent years the festival has created the Prix Un Certain Regard to help the best
film in the sidebar achieve distribution in France.
10
“Created by the French Directors Guild in the wake of the events of May ‘68, the Directors’
Fortnight seeks to aid filmmakers and contributes to their discovery by the critics and audiences
alike. ... [I]t created a breeding ground where the Cannes Festival would regularly find its
prestigious auteurs” (“Societé du Realisateurs du Films”).
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Suggested Citation
Luna, Maria, and Philippe Meers. “The Films of Ciro Guerra and the Making of Cosmopolitan
Spaces in Colombian Cinema.” Alphaville: Journal of Film and Screen Media, no. 14, Winter
2017, pp. 126–142. www.alphavillejournal.com/Issue14/ArticleLunaMeers.pdf. ISSN: 2009-
4078.

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Maria Luna is associated professor of contemporary television at TecnoCampus UPF
(Universitat Pompeu Fabra) and Researcher at the Institute of Communication Studies Incom-
UAB. She is a member of Grup Internacional d’Estudis sobre Comunicació i
Cultura (2014/SGR-01594) and a Doctor in Audiovisual Contents in the Digital Age with the
dissertation “Mapping Heterotopias, Colombian Documentary Films of the Armed Conflict”. She
has published academic papers in New Cinemas: Journal of Contemporary Film, Archivos de la
Filmoteca, Cuadernos de la Cinemateca, and several book chapters on documentary and
transnational cinema. She is academic coordinator of MIDBO (International Documentary
Festival in Bogota) and cofounder of the Association for Latin American Cinema in Barcelona.
Philippe Meers is professor in film and media studies at the University of Antwerp, where he
chairs the Centre for Mexican Studies, and is deputy director of ViDi, the Visual and Digital
Cultures Research Center. He has published widely on historical and contemporary film cultures
and audiences including in Screen (2010), Critical Studies in Media Communication (2013),
Bioscope (2015) and Alphaville (2016). With Annette Kuhn and Daniel Biltereyst he edited a
special issue of Memory Studies (2017) on cinemagoing, film experience and memory. With
Richard Maltby and Daniel Biltereyst, he edited Explorations in New Cinema History (Wiley-
Blackwell, 2011), Cinema, Audiences and Modernity (Routledge, 2012) and The Routledge
Companion to New Cinema History (2018, forthcoming).