Ver Cine Colombiano: Noticias | Proimágenes Colombia

The 2016 International Film Festival Rotterdam (IFFR), one of the world’s leading film events, is underway in Rotterdam, Netherlands, from January 27 to February 7. At this year’s 45th edition of the festival, eight feature films, including Oscuro Animal, will compete for a Tiger Award in the Official Competition.
 
Oscuro Animal is a production of Mutokino (Colombia) and Gema Films (Argentina), in co-production with Viking Film (Netherlands), Sutor Kolonko (Germany), and Boo Productions (Greece).

 The film’s screenwriter, director, and producer was Felipe Guerrero, director of Corta (2014) and the short film Nelsa (2013), and editor of films such as Monte Adentro (2015), Fungi (2014), La playa D.C. (2012), The Squad (2011) and Crab Trap (2010).
 
The Tiger Award for Best Film, sponsored by the company HIVOS, one of the festival’s partners, gives out 40,000 euros to be shared by the director and producer of the winning film. The Special Jury Prize, which these productions will also compete for, grants another 10,000 euros to a film showing exceptional artistic achievement.
 
Oscuro Animal tells the story of three women’s journey from the jungle to the city, as they struggle to escape the violence of the war being fought in Colombia’s countryside. Each woman will undertake a journey in search of her own peace. Once they reach Bogota, they will pause to face the new path taken by their lost lives.
 
According to its director, the film focuses “on those who have suffered the violent impact of war and must flee, leave their homes behind, and find a new place in the world. I created a narrative mechanism with three interwoven stories about the forced loss of one’s home. Stories of women who flee, alone, and must face adversities until they finally find a place of shelter. The use of sound and images to express the omnipresence of nature in the stories is understood as an atmosphere from which the protagonists must escape, a metaphor for a dark animal that relentlessly stalks them, wherever they are. The latent feeling of terror in the film reverberates within my characters’ bodies, a condition that will follow them throughout their escape. To emphasize this imprisonment and the way in which they are trapped by violence, I have created a film without dialogue, where words are held in, with an inner discomfort that prevents communication among the characters or between them and the outside world. A use of sound that disturbs us through its negation of text, as a declaration of a full-on cinematic style.”
 
The creators of Dark Animal include Gema Juárez Allén (Corta) as producer and executive producer; co-production by Marleen Slot (Adem, 2010), Ingmar Trost (Modris, 2014), and Vick Miha; Fernando Lockett (The Princess of France, 2014) as director of photography; Paola Andrea Pérez Nieto (Land and Shade) as production manager; Marcela Gómez (Buenaventura no me dejes más) as production designer; Julián Laguna (Fungi) as assistant director; Carlos Medina (Alias María, Gente de bien) in casting and actor training; Ana María Acosta (Liveforever) in costume design; César Salazar (Dust on the Tongue, Mateo) on live sound; editing by Eliane D. Katz (Nelsa); sound design by Roberta Ainstein (Nelsa, Corta); and field production by Miguel Zanguña Villalba (Embrace of the Serpent).
 
The other films competing with Oscuro animal in Rotterdam are History's Future by Fiona Tan (Netherlands); The Land of the Enlightened by Pieter–Jan de Pue (Belgium, Holland, Ireland, Germany); Motel Mist by Prabda Yoon (Thailand); Radio Dreams by Babak Jalali (USA); La última tierra by Pablo Lamar (Paraguay, Holland, Chile, Qatar); Where I Grow Old by Marília Rocha (Brazil, Portugal); and A Woman, a Part by Elisabeth Subrin (USA). The results will be announced at the awards night on February 5th, following the close of this year’s festival.