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Screening with conversation. Bienvenidos conquistadores interplanetarios y del espacio sideral

Bienvenidos conquistadores interplanetarios y del espacio sideral
Andrés Jurado / 2024 / Colombia-Portugal / 95 min.

In the theater of the Cold War, astronauts lost in the Darién are besieged by their deepest fears when surprised by an indigenous person — did they think they would be beheaded or devoured by a savage cannibal? A deconstruction of film and propaganda archives of tropical survival training challenges the colonial narrative inscribed in the conquest of space.

At the end of the screening, a conversation will take place with Andrés Jurado (director), Ana María Romano G. (sound artist), Andrés Silva (sound designer) and María Rojas Arias (producer), accompanied by Pablo Roldán, director of the Cinemancia Festival.

Director’s statement

The phrase “Welcome Interplanetary Conquerors and Outer Space” was taken from a welcome sign made by children from the Kennedy neighborhood in Bogotá when they were visited by American astronauts on their tour through Latin America in 1966. This scene is archetypal and reveals a certain passivity toward information and Pan-American political projects conceived by the U.S. and local governments. As a filmmaker, I have been interested in how the history of cinema reinforces colonial stereotypes, from the “Conquest of America” to the colonization of space. For me, these narratives have always seemed like fiction, especially when viewed from the perspective of our Global South realities. The atypical encounter between American astronauts and a shaman during their Survival Training in the Caribbean forests inspired me to make a kind of science fiction Anti-History, anachronistic, disrupted, delirious, based on archives and research that explores deep connections between the imagined futures of the past and the present. This film proposes a new montage of cinematic memory that empowers the viewer’s eye to interpret those moments in new ways, revealing connections and inferences that have been overlooked in the past.

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