La Nueva Medellín

In 1997, Catalina Villar filmed teenagers in a working-class district in Medellín, at the time “the most dangerous city in the world”. The group’s poet, Juan Carlos, was killed there three years later. As the title of this latest film announces, the city has changed. More to the point: it has been set up as a model of urban innovation. Whether climbing up and down endless steps or taking the “metrocable” – which gives some splendid high-angle tracking shots -, Manuel, one of the 1997 teenagers and now president of his neighbourhood committee, leaves the imprint of his street-trekking activism on the film. However, the editing alternates this hyperactive thread with memories of Juan Carlos, introducing quotes from his poems and scenes of his parents’ red-tape marathon to obtain redress for his murder. “This night, all is written in the ink of blood…” wrote the poet. Catalina Villar brings the district’s past violence back to the surface of this new Medellín, with its immaculate egg-shaped cable cars. The mural painters wonder how they can suggest the symbolic presence of weapons without explicitly showing them. In one powerful sequence, a meeting with the mayor highlights the divide separating the external image of a hi-tech Medellín and the ground works that need carrying out to prevent the huge and recently built España library, which towers over the hillside but is already in ruins, from becoming a metaphor of the failure of progress. It is already shrouded in a black veil, in mourning for an urban utopia… (Charlotte Garson)