Colombia is Black. Mainstream Latin American media entities have been forever self-plagued by a public acknowledgement issue in platforming Afro-Latino life. So it is remarkable that with multidisciplinary artist, producer, and filmmaker Camila Beltrán’s short film Pacífico Oscuro, we get much more about the Black Colombian experience than what’s on the label. The folklore of contacting spirits of nature to acquire singing ability is a pretense amid the extremes of the engulfing flames of carnage and majestic ocean waters that obeys no one.
Centered on the Black youth of Cali, Colombia, Beltrán fuses together an audiovisual collage of varied frame rate, super 8 film, found footage, music, and poetry to allude to the systemic oppression of Black Colombians. It is important for the spectator and reader to know that their community has been subjected to forced relocations and even disappearances during the Colombian Civil War. Pacific coastland rights awarded to them per Constitutional Law 70 of August 1993 have not been totally fulfilled. And a recent census was decried by Black Colombian activists for intentionally reducing their statistics on paper.
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The film opens in complete darkness with just a female voice present (narrator Elena Hinestroza) to tell us “Whoever listens to this story without having lived it will not believe it, but it’s true.” This invitation to set aside perceptions could be referring to both white people’s prevalent dismissive attitude of (their) racist impact, but also the dismissal of folklore by supposedly evolved individuals of today.
In a night scene following a group musical performance, the young girls traveling the city on foot, the narrator reflects that “Nowadays, we feel rage. We can never escape our beliefs.” Footage of the mountains on fire that elevates a Cristo Rey (Christ the King) monument that no doubt reminds many a spectator of Rio de Janeiro’s Christ the Redeemer statue, another place where anti-Black social destruction is prevalent, the film’s consciousness shifts to the retribution Mother Nature repays via voiceover: “The Pacific also shares our anger. And I see it coming.”
Pacífico Oscuro, in a similar vein as late Afro-Cuban filmmaker Sara Gómez’s De cierta manera [One Way or Another] (1974) fuses the documentary and narrative forms to vividly present the volatility of a collision course between the lives of Black citizens and those who create authority for themselves to exert their often treacherous will on the oppressed. I leave you with the words of Beltrán’s closing self-penned poem exhorts the natural/supernatural to act within us and for us in a world that consistently defies the call of collective harmony with fellow humans and environment alike: “Dark Pacific/ Eternal night that we carry within us/ return to us the mystery that was stamped out/ cover with your shadow the burning flames of greed/ and carry us far away from here.”