A hand with painted fingernails. Hair held by a colored clip, earrings. These coquetries would not be surprising anywhere else in Latin America, but the camera is here in the middle of the Colombian jungle and this woman is a guerrilla who polishes a weapon at daybreak.
Canadian-Colombian filmmaker Germán Gutiérrez gained exceptional access to the final moments of the country’s largest guerrilla, the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia (FARC), before the signing of the historic peace treaty in 2016. He made it his duty memory, a film shot in more than 120 days in the field over five years, which documents the difficulties of ex-combatants to reintegrate into civil society.
History will judge therefore opens on those days when the guerrillas still seem firmly convinced of their commitment. The documentary opens Friday in Montreal, after a few screenings at festivals in Quebec and France.
We discover the fighters, soon crowned “ex”, in the privacy of their camps and their modest dreams: sleeping on a mattress rather than a pile of leaves, cooking on gas rather than fire, and having children, which was not allowed in the ranks of this self-proclaimed “people’s army”.
“The question of making a film about the peace process didn’t even come up, it was unavoidable for me,” said Mr. Gutiérrez in an interview. The filmmaker, to whom we owe several films, including The Coca Cola Affair, who shot my brother, Variations on a Familiar Theme And Fardeauhas thus plunged back into his native Colombia to expose the wounds that are very difficult to close.
For these protagonists, the ceremonial signing of the peace treaty, between leaders solemnly dressed in white, quickly gave way to the test of reality. Were they ready to lay down their arms and live as simple civilians, on the very territories they ruled with violence? With what livelihood? And under what roof? Would Colombian society accept them?
“What really struck me was the amount of women, indigenous people and Afro-Colombians in the ranks of the guerrillas. They were really the poorest people in society, who had hardly ever received an education, or even who had never been out in a city or even a village,” says Germán Gutiérrez.
A multiple movie
The film is resolutely choral, an “assumed choice of direction”. Describing the pitfalls and dilemmas through a wide variety of protagonists is effective and brings us to the ground.
It was also about dealing with the immense challenge of staying in contact with people or finding them in a moment of transition by definition: “For many of them, I didn’t even know their real name. They didn’t know Facebook existed. The first time we met them, we gave them cell phones with prepaid cards to be able to join them,” explains the Montrealer.
The Colombian geography made of mountains and the absence of practicable roads also added a layer of obstacles. “Sometimes it took more than a day to arrive, and then you can’t get your camera out right away. It’s a difficult ground,” admits Gutiérrez.
The images have the immense merit of showing us the beauty of this territory with its “exuberant” nature, an almost “disturbing” contrast, according to him, with the harshness of life there.
And even if we would sometimes like to know what happens to certain protagonists seen at the very beginning, this multiplicity of experiences makes it possible to undo the image of a homogeneous block of guerrillas.
Their reintegration is presented in an extremely concrete way: you first literally have to build the walls of the houses in the demobilization areas where they will live. Make them exist, too, in the state registers, those who have never had an identity card. Steps that seem simple turn out to be almost impossible. An indigenous ex-combatant, for example, explains that he cannot send a form to his parents who live in a community on the border with Brazil, who have no address and cannot read or write.
Representatives of the Special Jurisdiction for Peace, a transitional justice mechanism, visit one of these “villages” of demobilized guerrillas. They explain that they are in the process of determining which crimes will be amnestied and which will be tried, an extremely delicate line to draw.
Many seek some form of truth, justice or reconciliation. This mother who saw her minor son forcibly recruited by the guerrillas, just after being chased from her farm. She is looking for a piece of him, any memory, anything to take note that he lived, or “at least his little bones”, she asks a leader of the former guerrillas.
The duration of 140 minutes makes it possible to show the magnitude of the suffering, the abyss of the tearing of this society. For the filmmaker, all is not black in the portrait of the country today: “I am told: “Yes, but Germán, there is still violence, exile, poverty. You don’t change a society so quickly, it takes two, three generations. The damage is too deep. »
Without falling into a romantic vision of these people who killed, kidnapped, tortured, Gutiérrez’s great achievement is to succeed in humanizing them. They are no longer those warriors of the jungle, sometimes blindly adored by the Communists, sometimes disproportionately demonized by the United States and the Colombian right.
They are Esteban, who lives for music and is happy just to have a picture of his family. “Do you know what it’s like to spend 14 years without hearing the voice of a loved one, without being able to see them? “They are also this mother who ends up admitting that her spouse has joined the” dissidence “, factions which have started to make the law again in certain Colombian regions.
We must also get out of indoctrination: “The forest has always been my home and my trench”, says Patricia, for example.
The work is an important document for understanding the history of a conflict that is still seeking its end point.