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part of
double bill #6
Snow Edge
Borde de nieve
Bogota Short Film Festival
2022
In the tropics, the so-called perpetual snows disappear. A new landscape emerges. Humans build a monument to the loss and, at the same time, a portal to travel to that ancient ice age. Different audiovisual materials are used to build a heterogeneous idea about the thaw and possible origin of the Páramo landscape.
Bio Juan Francisco Rodríguez
Juan Francisco Rodríguez is a filmmaker and artist living and working between Germany and Colombia. He completed his bachelor’s in film at the Universidad Nacional de Colombia and is currently pursuing his MFA at the Academy of Media Arts in Cologne. His films and installations have been exhibited in art exhibitions and film festivals in Colombia, Perú, Brazil, Canada, and Germany. He has worked in artistic collectives, as director of photography, and as an assistant programmer for events such as the Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogotá.
Celluloid film is similar to plants, but also lagoons. The process of printing an image on light-sensitive material is reminiscent of the photosynthesis process that plants undergo when they capture sunlight. In turn, the surface of a lagoon acts as a mirror, reflecting or ‘projecting’ images.
There is another remarkable link between cinema and nature, specifically with water. A film like Borde de nieve, which uses both analogue film and digital images, is made possible by a generous stream of consciousness, like a rippling river of ideas. Through disjointed fragments, the film moves us through landscapes and generates a pilgrimage experience.
The melting mountain peaks serve as a metaphor; the vanishing ice releases new manifestations of the landscape. The ecosystem underwent various forms of violence; layer after layer of melting exposes human passage and destruction. Social crises thus become visible in the biosphere: rivers and mountains as witnesses of a struggle. The mountain ranges lead us to the past or the future, both as access or escape routes. The film’s central mountain thus provides a geological, spatial, temporal, and symbiotic encounter. Meanwhile, I walk on.
Credits
Script
Jazmín Rojas, Juan Francisco Rodríguez
Camera
Editor
Sound
Carlos David Velandia, Juan Francisco Rodríguez, Santiago Forero-Alarcón
Producer
Jazmín Rojas, Sebastian Jaimes