LIMBO
A FILM BY ALEXANDER L. FATTAL
Honorable Mention,
Best Documentary
Short
-
BOGOShorts
Best Short Film
-
Latin American
Studies Association
Film Festival
An oneiric journey through Alex’s life as a former FARC guerrilla leads to a reckoning with the devil inside of him. Alex tells his story of war and its legacy inside of a truck transformed into a camera obscura, a space where dreams suffuse with reality and a life in limbo is illuminated.
WATCH TRAILER
SYNOPSIS
An oneiric journey through Alex’s life as a former guerrilla leads to a reckoning with the devil inside of him. His only cure is yagé, a sacred plant used by his indigenous community. As both a perpetrator and victim, Alex exemplifies the complexity of the Colombian conflict and the difficulties of simply moving on.
​
LIMBO tells Alex's story in a truck transformed into a giant camera obscura in which up and down, wrong and right are not fixed. It is in this confessional, surreal, psychoanalytic space where we are confronted with life mired between a militant passed and a civilian present.
Through this experiment in filmmaking, in this moving black box, a life in Limbo is illuminated.
"A camera obscura for peace."
​
BBC WORLD
​
FESTIVALS
2019
Sheffield Doc/Fest (Sheffield, UK),
​
BOGOShorts (Bogotá, Colombia)
2020
Cinéma Du Réel (Paris, France)
​
Festival International du Documentaire Émergent (Paris, France)
Latin American Studies Association Film Festival
(Guadalajara, Mexico)
Festival Internacional de Cine Documental de Buenos Aires (Buenos Aires, Argentina)
Muestra Internacional Documental de Bogotá (Bogotá, Colombia)
Panorama Du Cinéma Colombien (Paris, France)
Centre Film Festival (Philipsburg, PA)
2021
​
Die Lateinamerikansische Tage Leipzig (Leipzig, Germany)
DIRECTOR'S NOTE
How do you film the sensation of being suspended between worlds? How do you tell a story of a permanent transition? For former guerrillas from the Revolutionary Armed Forces of Colombia mired between a military past and a civilian present it’s not a theoretical question.
My solution was to transform the payload of a truck into camera obscura and film Alex’s oneiric narrative in a topsy turvy road trip. The story behind the truck camera is a long one. But a key moment was when I sat in the payload of the truck camera for the first time and it began to move.
The world transformed. Bicyclists pedaled in the sky, buildings jutted toward the ground, clouds slid across the floor, and dappled shadows of trees melted sideways as the truck turned a corner.
The beauty of these images stirred something inside of me and I became overtaken with the idea that such an emotional response could be harnessed to foster empathy for a population that has generally been deemed unworthy of it.
“a truck, the largest and most basic camera
in the country”
SEMANA
CAST & CREW
WITH
JAVIER ALEXANDER JOJOA
PRODUCED BY
NICOLAS VAN HEMELRYCK, CLARE WEISKOPF - CASATARÁNTULA (CO)
ALEXANDER L. FATTAL - BREAK THE FRAME FILMS (US)
WRITTEN AND DIRECTED BY
ALEXANDER L. FATTAL
DIRECTOR OF PHOTOGRAPHY
JULIAN MEJIA VILLA
EDITOR
DAVID ROJAS
MUSIC COMPOSER
SANTIAGO LOZANO
EDITING CONSULTANT
GUSTAVO VASCO
NARRATIVE CONSULTANT
PAOLA CASTILLO
COLOR CORRECTION
JOSE ESPINOSA
2.35 DIGITAL
SOUND DESIGN & MIX
ALEJANDRO URIBE-HOLGUIN,
ANDRES SILVA - LA TINA SONIDO
SPECS
