Un nuevo amanecer

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Note of intent

What unites me to the women participating in this story is that, as children, due to our social and economic condition, we all had one, sole, future: to enlist in the guerrilla ranks. The telling of this story is extremely emotional. It forces me to face very painful moments of my life.  Besides just making a film, we wish –the women and I– for this narrative to be cathartic, and help us accept that those specific events we once encountered along our paths, in spite of their harshness, have been essential to our finding meaning to our lives.

Synopsis

It took but a stroke of fate to make the girl I was then to not show up at that meeting with war. Other girls did go to it, and ended up by joining the guerrilla. This story reemerges after all these years and, now, I am inescapably pursuing it. In 2016, I found out that, after the signing of the peace treaty with the Colombian government, 8.000 guerrilla members, of which 3.500 were women. I thought to myself: “one of those guerrilla women could have been me.” Months later, I found myself deeply immersed in the jungle, searching for those women whose destiny had been, indeed, to join the guerrilla. I lived there with many guerrilla women. In 2017, these women surrender their arms and reenter civil life. They begin to look for their families and children. The hardest of all is knowing that civil society doesn’t want to take these female ex-combatants back in.

Visual concept

This story is told in chorus by five women: those who were members of the Colombian FARC guerrilla and myself, Priscila, the filmmaker. This documentary opens up like a flower, where each woman is a petal that takes a life of its own, and flourishes. It is like an endless journey that Priscila initiates as she heads into the rainforest landscape in search of these guerrilla women. This is an angst-ridden film, full of suspense, yet full of hope, due to the women’s struggling capacity; like the phoenix, they will always rise from the ashes.