Director, Screenplay
Ciro Durán
Convention (Norte de Santander), December 16th, 1937 – Tobia (Cundinamarca), January 10th, 2022. He was a notable film, television, and theater director, who began his career in the sixties. Among his outstanding works are Gamín (1978), a documentary for which he won awards such as the Donostia Award for Best Director and the Fipresci Award at the San Sebastian Film Festival, and the Golden Owl at the 4th Film Festival of the Colombian Institute of Culture - Colcultura, in addition to being selected to participate in the Directors Fortnight, thus becoming the first Colombian to be invited to the Cannes Film Festival. He also was a Jury Member at the Huelva (1977), Leipzig (1978), Moscow (1981), and Montreal (1984) Film Festivals.
In the mid-1950s he began studies in chemistry and mathematics at the National University of Colombia. However, in 1959 he left to settle in Caracas, Venezuela. Once there he studied theater at the Casa Sindical del Paraíso with playwright Román Chalbaud as a teacher. Two years later he gets involved in the activities of the National Cinematheque of Venezuela, taking a special interest in Soviet cinema and studying the works of Eisenstein, Pudovkin, Dovjenko, and Kulechov. He also takes part in the “Sangre Azul” bar gathering, where he meets with personalities linked to cinema and literature such as Chalbaud, Paco Torres, Manuel Mallaber, and Claudia Nazoa. In this period he begins to write his first scripts.
It's in this context that he directed his first movie, the medium-length film La Paga (1962), in which, influenced by Soviet cinema and his childhood memories, he addressed the issue of Venezuelan peasant struggles. In 1963 he traveled to Europe to find work in the cinematographic field and to learn more about the business. There he landed a role as a production assistant for director Jean Lefait on the film Special Mission.
Once again in Caracas, he worked as assistant director in the productions I liked a man, a film by Raúl Martinez Solares; Action in Caracas, by Eduardo Mulargia, Four men with a clean fist, by Robert Topart; and The governor, by René Cardona Jr. In this shooting, Ciro met Mario Mitrotti, who also worked as assistant director and with whom a year later, along with Francisco Luna, found a cinema club in the Guaicáipuro neighborhood theater, where films by Bergman, Fellini, and Rosi would be screened. At that time he would become a board member of Sutic (Single Union of Film Industry Workers).
He traveled to Colombia in 1967 and directed his first feature film Aquileo Venganza (1968), in which he again explored his concerns about peasant issues such as land dispossession, but this time through a western that takes place immediately after the Thousand Days' War. This production won the Catalina de Oro award for best performance, awarded to Carlos Muñoz, at the Cartagena de Indias International Film Festival.
Permanently based in the city of Bogotá, he worked as a director of commercial spots for the Venezuelan company Neo-Films. Later, in 1969, he, Joyce Ventura, Mitrotti, and Bella Ventura, founded the Producer Uno Ltda., with which he continued producing commercial ads. In 1971, together with Alberto Giraldo, Hernando González, and other filmmakers, he founded the Colombian Association of Cinematographers-ACCO, a union body in charge of promoting laws to protect Colombian cinema and of which he was president.
In co-direction with Mitrotti, he made the documentary short film Corralejas de Sincelejo (1974), which managed to garner recognition such as the World Federation of Trade Unions Prize at the Leipzig Film Festival, the second prize at the Bilbao Film Festival, the Prize awarded by the Colombian magazine Antena, the Best Colombian Short Film Award from the Colombian Institute of Culture, the Catholic Filmmakers Award at the Oberhausen Festival and the Festival News Award at the Krakow Film Festival. In addition, he was part of the Official Selection of the London Film Festival-BFI.
He worked on the unfinished project Los flagelantes de Santo Tomás (1976), about the pilgrims who lash themselves during Holy Week in the town of the same name in the department of Atlántico. Later, in 1976, he made the medium-length film Gamín, which portrays the subject of children living on the streets in Colombia, and which won the Colón de Oro at the Huelva Film Festival, Spain. It is on this stage that he meets Claude Antoine -producer of the film Antonio das Mortes by Brazilian filmmaker Glauber Rocha-, who, with the support of the French National Audiovisual Institute, funds the project to turn it into a feature film. That same year he made the documentary short film Mar Tayrona, co-directed with Joyce Ventura.
In 1978 he dedicated himself to working in the production of the feature film Gamín, traveling to France to carry out post-production work. In addition to all these recognitions, this production was distributed in Paris theaters by SND - Société Nationale de Distribution, and exhibited in Vendome and Bonaparte theaters for six months. It was also acquired by the BBC in London, by the Gaumont circuit in Germany, by the Vog distributor in Belgium, and by Swedish Television. In that year he was also elected president of the Colombian Film Cooperative-Copelco. During the next year, he worked on the unfinished project Folklore of the Pacific, which depicted the musical and choreographic culture of the San Juan River region, in Chocó.
In the German Democratic Republic, he filmed Children of two worlds (1979), produced by the Television of that country. Some other of his projects included the short film You will reign —which along with three other shorts made by Alberto Giraldo, Jorge Alí Triana, and Mario Mitrotti make up the feature film The Four Ages of Love—, Tropical Snow (1988), Comment vont les enfants - Carmelo ( 1990), —co-directed with Jean-Luc Godard, Anne-Marie Miéville, Lino Brocka, Rolan Bykov, Jerry Lewis and Euzhan Palcy—, and The Ship of Dreams (1996).
In 1985 he directed The Penny War, co-produced with the Zweites Deutsches Fernsehen television network in Germany, which portrayed the day-to-day life of bus drivers in Bogotá at that time. This production won the Bochica de Oro award at the second Bogotá International Film Show and the Chigüiro de Oro award at the second edition of the Development Film Festival in Bogotá. His last directing work was The seizure of the embassy (2000), in which he relives the events of the takeover of the Embassy of the Dominican Republic in Bogotá by the M-19, in which 14 ambassadors were held captive for 2 months. The film received a special mention at the Cartagena de Indias International Film Festival.