"This is a film about faith and hope. About the language of heaven. About hunger and affection. Health and spirits. The living and the dead. About the palpable and the invisible. About strength in prayer, in the communal and in the stories - both tragic and joyful - that bind us together. This document thinks of faith as a territory of hope and not fiction. It is about the beauty and tenderness of the gesture of faith - the purest expression - in the faces of Colombian believers.
This documentary investigates and converses with testimonies of miracles in Colombia. It is a film exclusively about faces: cinema-confessional. Gestures from multiple religions, backgrounds and social classes recount their testimonies of faith. The stories reveal the deep spiritual connection to love, forgiveness, hunger, war, death, pain, motherhood, home. There is no miracle without conflict: each testimony reveals, within their spiritual experience, the realities of the country. The stories map Colombia in its contradictions: a territory that has failed in public health and housing; a country in its cracks of war and gender violence; a country of exile, of hunger, of survival.
In this search for testimonies I want to put all my concerns as an artist and as a believer. To film faith with faith. To go through the film questioning the positions and ethical distances -always so diffuse- of those who film documentaries. In this case, I would like to address the question that I have been asking in my previous works and that is, finally, the documentary filmmaker's job: how to film the other? Here the bet is to avoid prejudices and traps. To look for complicity and security with each testimony in the interviews. To discover, in each interview, the glimpses of each filmed face.
It is a documentary about faces and their stories and contrasts. But, mainly, it is a study on Colombian devotion: the priority to magic, hope for tomorrow, compassion, swindle, love. The questions that drive this documentary are: how to film faith, with what distance, with what questions, how to film the intimate, what do the miracles reveal about the territory? I seek to understand and contrast my gestures as a documentary filmmaker: during the search, during the interview, during the editing. To analyze the ethical politics of documentary filmmaking. I would like, out of gratitude to the testimonies, to be able to film and edit their testimonies of faith. For that is the implicit reason for the documentary and the only source of its beauty.
So far I have filmed 18 testimonies in the cities of Bogota, Cali and Sogamoso. The ambition of the project is to move the research in different regions, work with local people and film as many testimonies as possible, work on the editing and narrative of each one and make a choice of twenty testimonies for the final editing. The development of the documentary is also given to God in its development: it is chance that has put many of the testimonies in the film. Since the beginning of the production, I have found stories of miracles in conversations with cab drivers, with patients in the waiting room of a hospital, in bars and in spaces, supposedly, alien to the spiritual. In Colombia, faith is palpable. In Colombia, heaven is alive.
My intention is, through these stories, to draw a map of spiritual beliefs in Colombia, to analyze the clinging to the most believing country in the world and, at the same time, to study the stories and the relationships between them. Each testimony is linked to the country in which they have lived: from paternity, from surviving the war, from illness, from hunger, from anguish, from disappointment. The documentary aims -like X-rays-, to detail what is underneath the believing society and the relations they have with the Colombian reality. In a country where public health, education and housing fail, faith supplants these shortcomings and prayer becomes hope. This is a documentary about spirituality but, mainly, about the understanding look and the believing look. A documentary where my compass and my purpose is to film with tenderness. The position of the camera that seeks serenity. To believe in the stories without prejudice. To look with purity: to find a miracle in each testimony."
