Guérilla des FARC, l'avenir a une histoire

Under the auspices of Canaguaro, Duni Kuzmanich's fictional account of guerrilla warfare in the 50s, and Rio Chiquito, JP Sergent and Bruno Muel's documentary on the birth of FARC, we look back over half a century of life in the Colombian underground. Filmed over a period of 10 years, the men and women who took up arms against a backdrop of great social violence recount their lives as fighters and their complicated exits from the maquis.

"In Guerilla des FARC, l'avenir a une histoire, seasoned French documentarian Pierre Carles offers an immersive, illuminating survey of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), a guerrilla organisation fighting the Colombian state for land rights since the 1960s. Comprising of footage shot by the filmmaker and the militants themselves, Guerilla des Farc is structured as a letter to Carles’ late stepfather Dunav Kuzmanich, the Chilean filmmaker behind Canaguaro (1981), an early film sympathetic to the FARC’s cause.
Spanning ten years, from the beginning of the FARC’s peace negotiations in 2012 to the recent election of ex-guerrilla Gustavo Petro as Colombia’s president, Carles’ film charts the incredible evolution of a revolutionary movement: from persecution and demonisation to disarmament and constitutional power.
Interspersed with a historical view of the FARC are vignettes from the day-to-day life of the guerrillas, whom we see cooking, washing and weaving hammocks in the forest. This remarkable synthesis of the epic and the intimate is reinforced by the film’s touching emphasis on the civilian lif”’e of the combatants after disarmament: the struggles of peacetime turn out to be no less daunting than those of armed conflict. Carles’ pensive and poignant film shows that reconciliation comes at a price."
(Srikanth Srinivasan - IFFR International Film Festival Rotterdam)