Besos fríos

On the outskirts of Bogota, the voices of youngsters killed by the army continue to echo for their mothers. Here, Nicolás Rincôn Gille proceeds with the same blend of rigour and sensitivity that run through the previous films in his long-haul project, Campo hablado, which he described as “something built at the moment of saying it”. Most often heard as voice-overs, the mothers’ accounts do indeed build up a presence that a priori seems impossible to achieve. One mother, for example, remembers that her son loved picking out shapes in the clouds, and the filmic image prolongs her words. Recent Colombian reality has browbeaten the traditional oral imaginary without however silencing it: it adapts and invents communication with the “blessed spirits” of those whose wooden crosses, stuck into graves containing incomplete remains, bear only the dates of death. Fragments of the mothers’ everyday life, chiselled into the brevity of the film, firmly anchor the evocation of their sons’ “icy kisses”, given as they fall asleep. Not quite supernatural, but beyond superstition, the dialogue that emerges is prolonged with infinite tenderness by the director’s attentive listening. The final inter-title, with its factual reference to state violence, expands these delicate individual fragments to lend them a collective and political dimension. (Charlotte Garson)