When the land was Mma

Carlos Villalba
Colombia / 2020 / 46min

Right at the beginning, Cuando la Tierra era Mma wovens the circular affections that set a course for the movie: Dayana tells a dream in which her grandmother advised about starting a trip around La Guajira to understand the territorial conflicts in her clan. “Dreams reveal what is going to happen,” people with documents are going to claim the territory, to claim the land that keeps the ancestor’s corps. Nevertheless, the limits revealed in this movie are other, not just a set of documents and signatures; the limits extend to the threshold of State violence and powerful organizations. Between blood-tainted birds by dented vaginas, fruit from a cactus, intuition, and the fury of Juyá (the rain), this medium-length film takes us to the origin of life: the magma, the root. In this film, we do not know when the feet end and the ground starts: they both constantly dialogue in a choreography of the intuition that goes over the dry and eroded footprints left by the alijuna (non-indigenous people), those wounds that have been left in Mma (the earth).

By Valentina Giraldo Sánchez

Producers: Ana Camila Jaramillo | Ressearch Group on Images and Lecture Practices – Javeriana University | Indigenous Unity of Indigenous students – Uniguajira | Photography: Juan David Mahecha | Sound: Nicolás Gutiérrez | Editing: Carlos Villalba and Ana Camila Jaramillo | Script: Carlos Villalba and Dayana de Armas Epieyu

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