Colombia Presente! 2025
This October we return with Colombia Presente!, a programme that, for the fifth time, opens a window to Colombian cinema in Scotland. At the same time, it invites audiences to reflect on what we think of as COLOMBIA and its filmography. This is hardly a surprise, as Cinemaattic has been showcasing an increasingly diverse range of independent Latin American cinema, and Colombia has always been at the top with its great production.
With a small but powerful collection of short and feature films, we hope to spark reflections that help us revisit national symbols, examine emerging ones, and even dare to foresee or create others.
This year, John Jairo Quiroga, a.k.a. Yonqui in Edinburgh’s art scene, has drawn the poster image for this new edition: a provocative illustration of a hippopotamus ridden by a weary Policarpa Salavarrieta. The flowers in her hand, drooping downward, suggest a moment after celebration – perhaps a defeat, perhaps a heartbreak.
With a desire to move between the symbolic, the referential and the metaphorical, but also the literal and direct, we invite you to join the screenings taking place in Edinburgh and Glasgow between 7 October and 4 November. Our final event sees our return to the beloved Filmhouse with a screening of the acclaimed film Pepe by Dominican director Nelson Carlo De Los Santos Arias.
As is customary at Cinemaattic, we present a powerful short film programme united by a common thread: transatlantic relations—economic and symbolic, colonial and resistant—seen both through our own gaze and through that of the “other,” showing how these perspectives feed, separate, or blur into one another. Highlights include one of this year’s most celebrated shorts, Akababuru: Expression of Astonishment by Irati Dojura of the Indigenous Embera community, awarded a Special Mention in the Berlinale’s Generation Kplus section. We will also show About Happy Hippos and Sad Peacocks, a “contemporary fable” exploring how peacocks (originally from India) came to Berlin’s Pfaueninsel Island in the nineteenth century, and how hippopotamuses were introduced decades later to the banks of Colombia’s Magdalena River, linked to the legacy of the drug trade.
This month we also return to one of our most loved venues, the Leith Dockers Club, where we will pay tribute to filmmaker Jorge Silva, best known as the life partner, cameraman, and collaborator of Marta Rodríguez. We will screen his first work, Los Días de Papel (Paper Days, 1964), accompanied by live music.
We are also hosting a very special screening and conversation in both Glasgow and Edinburgh, in collaboration with GLARN and the workshop Thinking Cinema, Thinking Latin America. This takes place on 16 October at the University of Glasgow, culminating in a screening of the documentary El Rojo Más Puro (The Deepest Red, 2023) directed by Colombian filmmaker Yira Plaza. This screening will be repeated on 22 October in Edinburgh, where we will be joined by Andrei Gómez-Suárez, peacebuilder with the Colombian national government and writer based in Edinburgh, author of the recent book We Are Not Made of Sugar.
With great excitement to meet you and share great cinema, we look forward to welcoming you to these screenings.
