The placid ones’ syndrome

León Siminiani

Colombia – Spain / 2021/ 32’

“We are a country that can never do anything without noise,” a serious documentarist Luis Ospina tells the group of filmmakers, “Los quietos.” It is 2018, the presidential election year that leftist candidate Gustavo Petro lost in the second round. And the commemoration of the 70th anniversary of Jorge Eliecer Gaitán’s murder. “Los quietos” looks for Ospina, Petro, and a Colombian writer obsessed with assassinations, Juan Gabriel Vásquez. Along with them, the directors attempts a film essay -that does not get to be finished- about a hypothetical syndrome of stillness in this turmoiled country that Colombia is. Five decades later, an investigator finds the unfinished images and removes them from their silence to draw the sense of a “present” of pandemics, lockdowns, and ecological collapses. 

By Pedro Adrián Zuluaga

AWARDS/ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS:

Selected in Visions du Réel – Nyon International Film Festival 2021

Producers: Jorge Caballero, Elías León Siminiani, Ainhoa Ramírez

|Photography: David Correa | Sound: Alejandro Molano, Francesco Lucarelli, Nacho Royo-Villanova | Editing: Miguel A Trudu.

CINEMATECA DE BOGOTÁ / Capital Theatre

Thursday, October 28th, 3:00 p.m.  

Available from October 26th to November 1st at Virtual Theatre MIDBO for Colombia.