Laura Huertas Millán is a Colombian filmmaker who explores, anthropology, storytelling, fiction and documentary in their work. Tonight Open City Documentary Film Festival presents three of Millán’s films at the Glasgow Short Film Festival. The selection of shorts were all created whilst the filmmaker was undertaking a practice-based PhD at the Beaux-Arts de Paris and the Harvard Sensory Ethnography Lab. Research and investigation are at the heart of the films that are presented this evening.
The first film is the 30 minute short La Libertad (Columbia/ Mexico/ France, 2017). Here we follow a group of weavers and artists in Mexico. The filmmaker focuses on the mundane and the process of weaving to draw out the narrative and to catalogue the processes and actions of these people. The community is a matriarchal one where the women take the lead. This is expressed through talking head interviews, voice-overs and focussing the lens on these men and women. The result is an in-depth study of a group of talented women and highlights traditions, craft and creativity.
Jeny303 (Columbia/France, 2018) is very much the standout film of this screening. It is only six minutes in length and looks and feels very different from the other two films. With Jeny303 we see overlapping footage of architecture where the processing of 16mm film has allowed the filmmaker to experiment with interesting and engaging visuals.
Sol Negro (Columbia/ France, 2016) is a fiction which draws on a documentary style to tell the story of a singer recovering after a suicide attempt. It is a deep and personal story that blurs the line between reality and staged drama. The way in which the film is shot and how the protagonist is portrayed implies that the film is a documentary investigation. However, staged scenes where the protagonist sings in public suggest that there is more going on within the narrative.
During the Q and A after the screening, we learn more about Laura’s creative process. When discussing Sol Negro the filmmaker states that she was “Trying to find a link between melancholy and artistic expression.” This link was the driving force of the film. Laura also stresses the time it took to make this film and how finding the balance between fact and fiction was key in the outcome of Sol Negro. Laura also states that with her recent work “I was looking at the history of anthropology in Europe and how this is connected to colonisation,” and this investigation into people is exposed in the three shorts presented this evening.