Screening & Book Launch
Join us for a special evening bringing together cinema, literature, and dialogue on Colombia’s recent history of conflict and militancy. We begin with a screening of El rojo más puro (The Deepest Red; Yira Plaza O’Byrne, 2023), an intimate and political documentary exploring a daughter’s relationship with her father, survivor of a genocide and a committed leftist militant.
Following the film, we will celebrate the launch of We Are Not Made of Sugar, the latest book by Colombian scholar, writer, and peace-builder, Andrei Gómez-Suárez. The event will be chaired by Dr Charlotte Gleghorn, who will guide a conversation with the author and the audience considering how both the film and Gómez-Suárez’s memoir illuminate the same historical period, revealing personal memories and political struggles.
📅22nd October, 17:30
📍University of Edinburgh – Screening Room G.04 (50 George Square, EH8 9JU)
Free entry (registration recommended)
EL ROJO MÁS PURO / The Deepest Red
Dir. Yira Plaza O’Byrne | 73’ | Colombia | 2023
While Yira was growing up, her father’s union struggle kept Luis away from home. In the family album there is only one photograph of him with her and her two siblings. First it was his activism in the Union Patriótica, the rallies and assemblies that kept him away. Then came the threats. In 2014, Luis survived an attack that forced him into exile in Europe. Upon his return, father and daughter live together for the first time, and Yira discovers the fragility of a man who appears tough and, at seventy, misses his family. Disillusioned with the left-wing politics she once embraced, the director revisits the battles inherited from her father, stitching together archival material with her family’s memories and recent national events to question whether their convictions have been worth it.
We Are Not Made of Sugar: A Childhood Memoir from Colombia is a tale about growing up in the eighties and nineties during Colombia’s civil war. The narrator’s parents are young university lecturers and political activists working for equality and peace in Pasto, a small city in the southern province of Nariño bordering Ecuador, overlooked by the Galeras Volcano, today one of the most violent regions in a country bitterly divided by six decades of war.
Andrei Gómez-Suárez is a Colombian writer, international relations scholar,associate researcher at SOAS (University of London), and peace practitioner, co-founder of peacebuilding organization Rodeemos el Diálogo (ReD, or Embrace Dialogue).
Charlotte Gleghorn is Senior Lecturer in Latin American Film Studies and Director of Research for the School of Literatures, Languages and Cultures, University of Edinburgh.
Accessibility:
-Wheelchair accessible
-English captioning
