Ospina Cali Colombia

Luis Ospina, frontman of the Grupo de Cali – a pioneering group of filmmakers, artists and writers active in Cali, Colombia – was a most fascinating, impossible to place figure in Latin American cinema. He made fiction features as well as proto-Punk style documentaries that gave short shrift to categorical niceties, instead opting for hybridisations. Sure, a film like Pura sangre (1982) is fiction, but with so much reality in its details that one easily forgets it is all fantasy. It could have been real, these things do happen in one way or another, for this is Colombia.

In 2018, film director-teacher Jorge de Carvalho and his students sat down with Ospina in the comforts of a very fake jungle to talk about his life and works. With contributions from fellow Grupo de Cali-members including Carlos Mayolo and Andrés Caicedo, this interview became the basis for Ospina Cali Colombia. It’s a perfect and concise auteurist reading of Ospina’s complete work – to which little could be further added, as he died the following year. Since then, interest in Ospina seems to have only grown, especially as genre tropes and references to popular cinema are so elemental to his art. So, please, enter the labyrinth of Luis Ospina’s mind – for Cali, by now, is everywhere…

– Olaf Möller

Trailer

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