REATRATOS DE LA AUSENCIA: 2010

ABSTRACT:

Portraits of Absence is a physical and mental journey set out by Camila. In this journey not only she confronts her memories and absentness but also finds three kids, Tandita, Andrés and Lina who have had to live with the absence of their parents and therefore have been left to be looked after by their relatives. In the towns where they live, there are not job opportunities and this situation has generated an important amount of migration towards big cities and foreign countries of people in productive ages.

In this encounter we penetrate the intimacy of these three children and their universes, behaviors, routines, thoughts and feelings. These are their portraits, portraits full of presences and absences, of innocence and emptiness. This is an elegy to those grey days without rain brought about by absence, contemplation, to the personal story of these three children, to their time and place that in some way are marked by the same history of this country (Colombia).

Declaration of intentions from the director

Portraits of Absence is a documentary that was born out of a moment of intense sensations as I was experiencing numerous absences. As the time went by, these sensations became a chant to those who had left, to those that have to confront this situation every day. Through the stories of Lina, Andres and Tandita this issue came to transcend the personal level. Ever since this project was born, a base and purposes were set, perhaps naïve but sincere ones that looked to trespass the barriers imposed by industry in order to know its characters, enter in their intimacy, feel them, watch them, and confront ourselves with them.

There was always in me, ever since I decided to start the writing of the script and to approach the characters, a real necessity to know them, not of using them but of knowing them, not of criticizing them but to watch them just as they actually are. I wanted to make of this project a box of dreams, because to dream we have to cure the sorrows that tend to stop us, and to cure them, we have to sing to them, make them visible. I never had the purpose of making judgments about their stories; neither was I trying to make Colombian history - which marks us since it creates the current conditions in which we live -, I merely wanted to contemplate their coexistence with that history, with its time and place. We are grown ups and children that dream despite the fact that we have to deal with separation and absence, and I believe that even though you will see it in its first cut and there is still a long way of work to be done, that essence and purpose is already present in the film.

I strongly believe, from my short experience, since I am still young and have just begun to built my career and dreams, that commercial or noncommercial, fiction or documentary, the real challenge must be good films, and to me, those are the ones that are born from the inside, from our feelings and thoughts, and that have a considerably bigger end than profit. I also believe this challenge entails a great deal of time and risks but that are worth taking since, in a way or another, they make cinema reborn as art, not an elitist art as it does not displays intellectualism, but an art of stories loaded with feelings. In this kind of film, without disregarding others and all the work put into them, there exists a great struggle and even a bigger investment in work. One knows that only through it, through rigorous work at each stage and a strong personal effort and that of the characters, it is possible to make a good movie to come into existence, where all the feelings that one wishes to present are certainly transmitted. This is the challenge I chose and the one that I live.

Camila Rodriguez Triana

Portraits of Absence Screenwriter and Director

TREATMENT:

Documentary Proposal/Audiovisual Style

Portraits of Absence will be an essay-documentary that will not establish absolute conclusions but risk reflections over a given topic. Therefore, there will be an evident subjectivity that will have something to say and of whom there will not be an intention to hide. The presence of the director will be perceived as the person who looks at reality and shows it through the images recorded with her camera. Although the director will not become the main character - since its person will not be seen and neither will she be built as an attractive character, her questions will be heard, as well as her reflections and conversations. Her constant presence through the audio will lead the threat of the narrative. We will know she is a foreigner, a migrant that has traveled to those towns to narrate their everyday life, the constant migration of people in their productive stages of life. To avoid falling into the obvious assumptions of the one who does not know, the word will be given to the interviewed and the narrator will ask and reflect about it but will not conclude. At this point the main referent is the narrator/director of the documentary The Way South (1980-1981) Johan van der Keuken.

POrtraits of Absence will play with the materiality of the film to endow the narrative with meanings and generate sensations of slowness and emptiness. Likewise, great importance will be given to the work of edition through the use of newspapers, steady photographs and video in order to reconstruct the memory of the place and the customs of the population of these towns. The vast majority of these products will be in dark and earth tones.

In addition, we will seek to generate the sensation of stopped-motion in these three places to contrast it with the fast rhythm of big cities. To do so, we will play with the duration of the shots and frames.

The intention is to recreate a portrait in images of the three main characters (the three chosen families), and for this reason the scenery, the size of the shot, and the framing are fundamental. There will not be clips with many shots, giving privilege to two shots’ clips: one of them will emphasize daily work and activities that distinguish the characters and the other will be an interview where not only their faces will be shown but also their space, hands, clothing, and other details that describe them. At this point, places and objects become fundamental, thus, there will be a number of shots of their homes, places inhabited, and empty places, details that will help us to discover their life style and their economy in both, the town and the city. These two shots will be steady so that the characters will acquire major importance, and the audience will have enough time to see them and look for details. Given that the portraits will be made through images, the interview will focus on the theme of the documentary and not in the personal lives or tastes of the characters. In this respect the referents are Filmmaker's Holiday (1974), The Way South (1980-1981) both from Johan van der Keuken and The Gleaners and I (2000) from Agnes Varda.

Another important point is the journey itself, the constant travelling of the characters and the journey of the narrator. There will be images of roads and of the farm that separates the three towns. These images will be in color and in movement to give the feeling of travelling.

In the documentary the main aim is to make a portrait of each one of the objects of study, and through this exercise, approach different issues related to the reality of the country. In this sense, all elements ought to form an ensemble where each one complements the other in a narrative way; these relations might be of contradiction or completion nonetheless. It is important to clarify that, since this is an essay-documentary the narrative will be guided by the reflections on the issues and the search for the portraits. There is no need however, to conclude, but rather to describe.

• THE SEARCH FOR THE PORTRAIT

The portrait will be the main relationship established between the director and the objects of study. In order to do this, the use of shots that seek to reveal aspects of their personalities and their life-styles, will be used. In the case of the towns, it becomes fundamental the length of the shots and their rhythm in order to generate the feeling of slowness and emptiness. They will be long and steady shots of empty streets or places inhabited mostly by kids and elder people. Likewise, there will be shots of some of the houses’ facades, of closed shops or shops without customers, the crops, and the elders as they watch how time goes by just like the stream of the river. This slowness will contrast with the movement that the towns acquire at the weekends when the people in productive ages arrive, as well as with the speed from the cities. In the case of the three families, the spaces, the organization of their homes, the details of the objects they own, their position within the house, or the empty room left behind by the absent ones will be privileged. Each one of the characters will be recorded performing a daily activity that says something about their personalities or life-styles. During the interviews the scenery should also help to describe the person, as well as their expressions, gestures, and movements.

• FRIENDLY INTERVIEWS

Insofar as the personality and life-style of the subjects of study will be described through images, the interview will focus mainly on the constant travelling, the separation from the now absent ones and the job conditions offered in the town and the city. It is for this reason that the central themes of the documentary will be approached through the interviews: the constant migration of people in productive ages from the town to the city in the search for better working conditions that would allow them to support the people staying; the causes and consequences of these separations; the new dynamics and routines they generate in the relations within the family. Occasionally, the secondary themes of the documentary will be touched upon as well.

The interviews are intended to be close conversations between the director and the character´s portrait, leaving aside the typical positions of a formal interview. The interviewed will not be under pressure to answer all the questions or to do it in a particular way; on the contrary, the particular use of language, their reactions, silences, and doubts will be conceived as part of their personality and the narrative itself. They will always be left free to be, act, and speak as they do in their everyday lives. In this regard it is important to ensure that the director is close and generates confidence in the interviewed.

• USE OF RHETORICAL FIGURES

The rhetorical figure to be used in the documentary will be the metaphor defined by the stream of the waters of the Cauca River running alongside the three towns in its relation to the endless flow of habitants in productive ages towards the cities. The flow of the stream of the river and the movement in town of adults is opposed to the slowness experienced during the week, or in other words, to the part of the population that remains in the towns. Thus, the stream of water, sometimes fast and sometimes slow but in any case constant, mirrors in this way the phenomenon of migration. Besides, it is important to consider that the Cauca River plays an important role in the personality, customs, and history of Villapaz, Quinamayo and Robles (the towns under study). In the shorelines of the river, paramilitary armies killed people who were considered by them as collaborators of guerrilla groups. Their remains would be thrown to the river so that other habitants could see them and take this as a warning. As a result, around that time the historic custom of having baths in the river decreased considerably.

• PRESENCE OF THE NARRATOR

The narrator will speak in first person and will be present all along the documentary. Her position as immigrant or visitor to the three towns will not be hidden; neither will be her life and urban customs. On the contrary, her position will help us to establish the contrast between the rhythm and ways of life in the city and the three towns. We will hear her making questions constantly and her presence will be normally heard as a voice-over guiding the narrative. She will not have absolute positions nor will she give definitive conclusions. Her central interest is the making of portraits of the three towns visited and of the families that will be the main characters, leaving to the audience the responsibility of making conclusions. The narrator will also be in charge of the completion of the history of the towns by showing us the place where fishes used to be breed, by speaking of the time when the towns where seized by the paramilitary armies, and the changes that this brought about to the ways of life of the people, and finally, by making constant contrasts with her life in the city.

• THE AUDIO AS PART OF THE NARRATIVE

The audio will have a narrative function in this documentary and will be composed by the location sounds, the silences, voices, and music; effects will be kept down to a minimum. The location sounds as well as the silences will be part of the description of the objects of study – spaces and people – and will accompany the image complementing it. There will be images accompanied only by location sounds and silences that will help to make the portraits of the towns, as well as will give a break to the narration. The narrator and the main characters will perform the voices in the majority of the cases even though in the location sounds there will be presence of voices from the people of the town too. Music will help to generate moments of recess in the narration and will be present in the sequences shot in the city and during travels (images of the roads) but its use will be kept down to a minimum.

Film-maker’s Bio-filmography

Camila Rodriguez Triana wrote the script, directed and edited the short film documentary Prohibido Mirar [Forbidden to Look] (2008) which won the prize for best documentary in the “Fifth Day of Cinema and Bolivarian Documentary Video” (Santa Marta, Colombia 2007), received honorable mention from the jury in the “Audiovisual University Exhibition” MUDA (Colombia 2007), won for best production in the CESARES prizes at the Manizales University (Manizales, Colombia 2008), and received honorable mention from the jury in the exhibition from “El Espejo” (Colombia, 2008).

Her second short documentary called Fragmentación [Fragmentation] (2009) made for the Universidad Del Valle and commissioned by RTVC (Radio-Television of Colombia) and in which she participated as scriptwriter, director and producer is currently in the stage of distribution. It has already participated in the “International Films Festivals” of Cali and Cartagena (Colombia).

In the experimental area she has been scriptwriter, director and producer of the video art Unosolo (2008), which won for best experimental video in the VEO exhibition at the Santiago de Cali University (2008), and was given a place in the Official Selection of the “Toronto Festival” (2008), the Festival “Off de Courts metrages d’Amerique Latine” (2009), the 21st Festival “Rencontres Cinemas D’Amerique Latine” – section Ecran Libre – (Toulouse, France 2009), the “Festival de Video Arte Camaguey” (Cuba, 2009), and the “Festival Internacional Cine de Toro” (2009). This same documentary won the prize for Best Video Art in SIART Festival that took place in Venezuela (2009). Similarly, she has been scriptwriter, director and producer of the experimental video Agua (2009) which was part of the official selection in the “Festival de Video Camaguey” (Cuba, 2009), the “Festival Internacional de Cine de Toro” (2009), the 16th “Festival Latinoamericano de Video” (Rosario, Argentina 2009), “Ventanas” festival (Colombia, 2009), the ICARO festival (Guatemala, 2009), and the “Festival Caja de Pandora” (Colombia, 2009). Currently, Camila Rodriguez Triana is working in the making of her first feature film documentary called Retratos de la Ausencia [Portraits of Absence] for which she already won the prize “Doctv” (Colombia, 2009).

REATRATOS DE LA AUSENCIA

RETRATOS DE LA AUSENCIA / 52 MIN/70 MIN

Movies of the director 3 - PORTRAITS OF ABSENCE

Movies of the director 2 - PORTRAITS OF ABSENCE

Movies of the director - PORTRAITS OF ABSENCE

HUMAN EQUIPMENT - PORTRAITS OF ABSENCE

FOTO FIJA - PORTRAITS OF ABSENCE

PROJECT- POTRAITS OF ABSENCE

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