Breakfast with Our Song to War
An interview with Juanita Onzaga, director of Our Song to War
Where is the film set? How did you choose your characters?
The film takes place at the village of Bellavista, Bojayá in the region of El Chocó in Colombia. It’s one of my favorite places in the world, it’s very unique. Here lives the Afrocolombian culture, permeated by traditions and rituals that arrived from Africa and that stayed and mixed with others, creating a mixed culture that is rooted in African traditions but which has existed in Colombia for hundreds of years in a quite isolated place in the jungle. As I wanted the film to be a poem about the possibility of a future different from a never-ending war, I wanted to work with kids who were becoming teenagers. They represent the new generation talking about the conflict in our country, but it was also about keeping a certain playfulness in the way they relate to death, the rituals, their daily lives and their dead. At the age of 12-13, they still keep a lot of imagination and innocence in their way of being, but they also start to understand more and more the world out there.
How much were you interested in this community’s beliefs when you first planned to shoot? Do you have further projects on this subject?
The mystical way this community has dealt with such an ordeal as a massacre was what attracted me to this place. Their beliefs and rituals was what brought us to make the film. During the research before shooting, I figured out that they had a very specific relationship to death through the Novenario ritual and their singing of the Alabaos, which allows the living and the dead to find peace. I found this to be extremely symbolic in times when forgiveness and empathy seem so difficult. To me, they were an example of forgiveness and how to keep on going and wanting a different life in spite of what has happened in the past. Their resilience as a community comes from their beliefs and the rituals. That was the reason why I wanted to go there and explore the healing power of the music and the playful oral storytelling. My upcoming projects keep exploring the mysterious strings that tie the world of the invisible inside the visible world, as well as the imaginary worlds built around oral storytelling, in my next short film and my first feature film The Landscapes that you Seek.
When did you decide to focus on the question of death and spirits?
Sometimes there are things that obsess us. I’m obsessed with possibilities, beliefs and imagination around the idea that there is more than just the physical layer of the world. It is something that has fascinated me since I was very young. I grew up being told stories of beings, spirits, ghosts and things out there that are real, but invisible. Writing poetry and creating cinema has helped me open and explore questions about the meaning of life through the meaning of death as I did with my previous short film The Jungle Knows you Better than you Do. Thinking about death gives more value to life and our society has been treating death as a taboo, while somehow is the only certitude that we have in life. From the moment I started to wonder about the afterlife and the invisible string between the visible and the invisible realms, a whole new world of questions and mysteries opened. This has been my main quest through filmmaking as a way to explore and share my biggest questions, finding stories and characters out there that challenge the more traditional ways of perceiving what is real. It is not because something is invisible that it is unreal.
Why were you interested in the relationship to the river?
The river is what connects this particular community to the rest of the world. It is the only way to get to the village. Everything they know travels through the river. Not only food, but also war, good and bad news, as the village is isolated in the middle of the jungle. Since the river represents their only link to the world, it may as well be their link to the other worlds, to what there is before and after life. The river is also what brings us as a viewer to this village, as if the camera were a spirit that arrives from the jungle floating on the water. And it is through the ritual singing of the villagers and their work on memory, that the souls are able to go away to the afterlife, through the river again. Creating a cycle this way. What we experience in the short is a parenthesis between life and death, or life and afterlife, a cycle symbolized by the river. For me the river is a symbol not only of their resilience and their ability of letting go (since a river is never the same twice), but water is also a magical element of reflection on our emotions. Reflection on the past, reflection on our dead, reflection of the meaning of what surrounds us. A reflection of what is real, giving to the universe of the short film a hint of “magical realism” where what we experience is more than what we just see at first sight.
Would you say that the short film format has given you any particular freedom?
Sure. Every film has its own rules, and this particular film developed itself as a short film because it asked for it. The short form allowed us to play with the fact that the story of the film is not a “one-character story”, but an experience of a collective consciousness of what lives in this village and the people’s view on life and death. I don’t think we could have been as playful as we were with jumping from one story to the other if the film had been longer, since it was also about concealing a glimpse of the mystery of this village, rather than explaining the facts and giving too much information. The short form kept it focused and playful, just what we wanted.
Our Song to War is being shown in Lab Competition L5.
