Colombia
Colombia Delegation
September 21 - October 2, 2009
Filmmaker: Margaret Brown, The Order of Myths
Expert: Niklas Volmer
DELEGATION REPORT
Niklas Vollmer, Film Specialist
The Colombia American Documentary Showcase delegation (Margaret Brown, Filmmaker, and myself, Niklas Vollmer, Specialist) had the pleasure of engaging universities and cultural centers in Colombia’s three largest cities — Bogotá, Medellín and Cali — and Pereira, a city important for its location in the country’s coffee-growing region.
Bogotá, Medellín, Cali, Pereira
Our audiences ranged from 25 to 250 people in attendance. As the “documentary specialist” and an academic filmmaker, I found myself well situated to engage and take advantage of a number of rich cultural exchanges and learning scenarios. When presenting together, Margaret and I complemented each other, approach- and content-wise. She was savvy at delineating the evolution of her filmmaking career and the specifics of her documentary processes — including the ability to speak to fundraising and distribution for the independent documentary markets. Her documentary, The Order of Myths, screened quite well and stimulated a number of interesting discussions about race, culture, process and representation.
A specialist and per the U.S. Consulate in Bogotá request, I was charged with laying out the state of American documentary landscape. I spoke to the current renaissance of nonfiction in the U.S. that started in the late 1980s and mid-1990s with the first-run theatrical screening successes of prominent documentaries like Michael Moore’s Roger and Me (1989) and Steve James’ Hoop Dreams (1994), in addition to audience success vis-à-vis Reality television. I also lectured on the advent of documentary-only film festivals, niche distributors and television broadcast opportunities provided by PBS, the Documentary Channel and Current TV — the latter of which was particularly interesting to Colombian university students. I also spoke to the broad sense of documentary styles, modes and subject/content choices made by U.S. makers.
Knowing that Colombia has long-standing artistic investment in the country’s cinema traditions and that the majority of the American Documentary Showcase documentaries were fairly traditional in form and content, one of my goals was to broaden the sense of American practice by presenting examples of nonfiction that explored more avant-garde and subject-participatory/community-based advocacy modes in both single-channel and web-based form. I was pleased by the sophisticated manner in which the students and faculty engaged in the conversations about experimental and participatory practice.
I also came away with a strong sense that many of the Colombian universities stressed and fostered the critical discussion and practice of non-dominant documentary form. My discussions began by getting a sense of who was in the room and what their interests were; quite often the classrooms and screening theatres were populated by arts and cinema students and faculty who identified themselves more frequently as video art or experimentally inclined more often than as fiction or traditional documentary makers.
In multiple contexts, I showed examples of my and my students’ work and was struck by how personalizing my more introductory, general American documentary landscape remarks led to meaningful and moving personal conversation connections. I also regularly showed short clips and films — The War Tapes (Deborah Scranton, 2005) and Little Flags (Jem Cohen, 2000) — that explored U.S. involvement in the Iraq wars from multiple perspectives and modes; this platform allowed me to speak to the fact that no documentary topic or subject is “sacred” in the U.S. My intent in contrasting highly personal, single-authored work against more collaborative, subject-participatory approaches was to elicit discussions suggesting that the POVs of American documentarians range beyond the internationally known polemics of someone like Michael Moore.
Having witnessed how cultural centers and universities engaged short-form as well as the more experimental and participatory work, I strongly encourage future American Documentary Showcase organizers to seriously consider expanding their decision making to include shorts and less traditional documentaries in the next round of the selection process.
My general impression of the Colombian university landscape was that the faculty and students at public institutions were far more eager and prepared to engage the delegation. Margaret and I deeply connected with the faculty and students at the Universidad del Valle in Cali, and I have had a number of e-mail exchanges with faculty there about future possibilities of project and faculty or student exchange. With one or two exceptions, the private universities appeared unprepared and engaged. One of the BNC cultural directors mentioned that he anticipated this lack of engagement due to the privileged context of these schools.
My sense was that the private school students were less interested in the more general American documentary filmmaking lecture, and that I could best engage the students at private universities via the idea of documentary co-authorship, as evidenced by The War Tapes and Appalshop’s Thousands Kites Project, where there were compelling discussions of what it means to reach beyond the privileged side of the Digital Divide and reconfigure the idea of the authorship from a singular “me” to the collective “we” mode.
Bogotá
Another highlight of the trip was attending and presenting at the Muestra Internacional Documental XI in Bogotá, Colombia’s pre-eminent documentary festival. We met and had conversations with the festival director and a number of documentarians, producers and distributors from South America and Europe, and were well integrated into the programming and content mix.
Although we never presented at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia when in Bogotá, we were interviewed on camera and doggedly engaged by a significant-sized group of enthusiastic university students. It was quick to connect with these students, for example, upon my indicating that they were interviewing Margaret and me with the very same cameras currently employed by undergraduate students in Atlanta. Learning that the Universidad Nacional de Colombia is the most prestigious of Colombia’s public higher-education institutions, and that the university housed one of the country’s top filmmaking programs, we made a point of making as many university contacts as we could while attending the Muestra Internacional Documental.
We also received repeated invitations to tour and present at Universidad Nacional de Colombia — yet, disappointingly, we were told that logistical and political climate scenarios made this difficult. A few longer-term connection possibilities were made with the Universidad Nacional de Colombia students, and I have been unofficially advising one of them via Facebook about his in-progress documentary project. As an academic, my inclination was to foster connections and potentially meaningful conversations and collaborations with faculty and students at sister institutions elsewhere — and, upon departing from Colombia, I felt quite successful with this mission with at least four higher education institutions: the Universidad del Valle in Cali, Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira, Fundación Universitaria del Área Andina and Universidad de Antioquia in Medellín — the latter connection coming from a non-Showcase connection created by one of my past graduate students.
One of the complexities of conducting academic outreach in Colombia that Universidad Tecnológica de Pereira impacts long-term intercultural bridge-building is that any student or faculty exchange is framed by the concerns that arise at my university from the U.S. State Department travel warnings. While technology such as Skype and the Internet offer many possibilities for cross-cultural exchange and understanding, stepping out of one’s culture –– as the American Documentary Showcase afforded us for 13 days –– radically altered my perception of Colombia. I fear the possibility for cross-cultural learning is currently a “one-way street” for most potential US-Colombian student-faculty exchanges, and hope that the State Department is considering follow-up programs that foster longer-term research and learning travel exchanges.
Our itinerary was full in many respects. Margaret and I were interviewed by radio and television press a dozen or more times — and were in top form when interviewed by the two most important radio stations towards the end of the trip. Our interactions with press often occurred in the bi-national centers, or “Colombos,” as they were called. I found the Colombo at Cali extremely vibrant, and we had two truly meaningful conversations with those learning English and another with a round table focused on community-based documentary practice with local mediamakers, activists and students.
Margaret and I also became experts in navigating translation scenarios, which ranged from simultaneous to back-and-forth-type translation contexts. During the more official presentations and press interviews, the translators were our more nuanced communication lifelines and, after working in such proximity, I became very fond of all of them. I distinctly remember one translator, who was also a professor at the Universidad de Medellín, becoming quite emotional when he translated my own experiences with family and experimental “home movie” documentary making. It was very moving to connect vis-à-vis the idea of children and fathers so geographically removed.
Although I am not fluent in Spanish, my moderate language abilities were useful in the less formal contexts. Being away from my home university allowed me to adopt and, at times, be adopted by the Colombian students. I didn’t expect the brisk travel to allow for these types of personal connections and be so emotionally poignant for me, yet this is the unexpected gift of bringing your professional passion and personal experiences to where they absolutely have to stand on their own.
The American Embassy in Colombia team — especially Pilar Cabrera and Gloria Morales — were wonderful resources and companions and went the extra mile to give us cultural context and attend to any wish, need or question that arose for us. Pilar, Margaret and I had an especially meaningful ride up the foothills to explore the civic gifts of the Metrocables and Biobliotecas in Medellín — a city that is a stunning mix of old and new urbanism with a complex, post-Escobar vitality.
Another delegation highlight was meeting the reigning World Champion Salsa Champions in Cali while being privy to a private performance rehearsal that the Dean of the Social Communication School at the Universidad of Del Valle (who is also an eminent salsa scholar) graciously arranged with Pilar’s help. It was additionally interesting to negotiate the American Embassy in Bogotá, where we found the security interview as eye-opening as the wonderfully unexpected collection of contemporary art adorning the Embassy hallway walls.
I was not ready to leave Colombia and hope to return soon. I departed feeling privileged to engage such vital country and people with hopes for meaningful documentary project and university-to-university collaboration in the near future.
