CinemaAttic returns to the CCA with Colombia Presente!, this edition explores transatlantic ties seen from both sides of the ocean, revealing how these views clash, connect, and blur.
Join us and grab your tickets before they’re gone!
📍CCA, Glasgow
📆 15 October / 19.00 Doors – 19.30 Starts
Highlights include one of this year’s most celebrated shorts, Akababuru: Expression of Astonishment (Irati Dojura Landa Yagarí, 2025), a luminous tale of an Embera girl who must learn to laugh again, awarded a Special Mention in the Berlinale’s Generation Kplus section. We also screen About Happy Hippos and Sad Peacocks (Johannes Förster & Elkin Calderón Guevara, 2024), a “contemporary fable” tracing the improbable journeys of peacocks to nineteenth-century Berlin and hippopotamuses to Colombia’s Magdalena River, entangling colonial spectacle with the afterlives of the drug trade. From Colombia’s banana-growing north comes Acuatenientes (Andrés Gil Lozano, 2022), a fierce documentary following community leaders who confront agribusiness elites to reclaim their stolen water. Rounding out the programme is See it, Say it, Draw it (José Luis Cote, 2025), a rare experimental/essay work that invites viewers to re-imagine museum artefacts through collective drawing, challenging the colonial logics of display and the ownership of cultural memory. Together these shorts open a dialogue on how histories and ecologies travel across oceans, and how art can redraw our comprehension of symbols and power.
Short Film Programme
About Happy Hippos and Sad Peacocks
Johannes Förster & Elkin Calderón Guevara / 28’ / Colombia, Germany / 2024
How did peacocks, originally from India, end up on an island in Berlin in the 19th century, and hippopotamuses, a century later, on the banks of a river in Colombia? Their lives there appear to be “happy and free.” With a poetic, decolonial approach, the film transforms these animals into icons that reflect the whims of power.
Acuatenientes
Andrés Gil Lozano & Michel Ávila/ 16’ / Colombia / 2022
In the banana-growing region of northern Colombia, large landowners monopolize water resources for export crops, leaving surrounding communities without access. Leaders like Vladimir and Jhon lead the fight to regain control over water, mobilizing the community and challenging authorities in a struggle for justice and dignity.
Akababuru: Expression of Astonishment
Irati Dojura Landa Yagarí / 13’ / Colombia / 2025
Kari, an Indigenous Embera girl, is afraid to laugh. She learns from the myth of Kiraparamia (a legend in her culture) and gradually overcomes this fear. The film explores laughter as an act of freedom and cultural speech.
See it, Say it, Draw it (Verlo, decirlo, dibujarlo)
José Luis Cote / 13’ / United Kingdom/ 2025
This project explores human imagination through ethnographic objects. Participants draw museum artifacts (in one described case, from the Manchester Museum) to question how visual and sensory culture mediates the transmission of images across cultures.
