The co-production by Colombia, Brazil and France Los conductos, directed by Colombian Camilo Restrepo, was awarded as Best First Feature at the 70th Berlin International Film Festival (Berlinale)
Los conductos had its premiere within the section Encounters, a new competition within the Berlinale launched in this edition as a platform to recognize bold works by independent filmmakers who bet on new aesthetic and structural perspectives on the margins of the Official Selection. “On those cinema’s margins, very interesting films are being made and, sometimes, these films are frowned upon or seen by very few people and, at this moment, Encounters sheds a very special light on them,” Colombian Camilo Restrepo stated.
Produced by Helen Olive and Martin Bertier from 5à7 Films (France) and Felipe Guerrero from Mutokino (Colombia), and co-produced with Andre Mielnik (Brazil), Los conductos tells the story of Pinky, a man escaping a religious cult who finds shelter and a job in an illegal T-shirts factory.
The success of Los conductos marks a promising debut in the feature film field by Restrepo, with a work characterized by the jury of the Berlinale, composed by Serbian director Ognjen Glavonic, Egyptian director Hala Lotfy and Spanish programmer Gonzalo de Pedro Amatria, as “visionary, physical, elastic, as the 16 mm celluloid in which it was filmed.” The Best First Feature Award is endowed with EUR 50,000 (USD 55,000) to be split between director and producers, donated by the GWFF, a society dedicated to safeguarding film and television rights.
Regarding the film, its director affirms that “Pinky is looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, but ghosts are breathing down his neck. He is running for his life, and Colombia is on fire. But Colombia is alive.”
After participating in the Berlinale, Los conductos premiered in Latin America within the Atlas section of the UNAM International Film Festival (FICUNAM) in Mexico, an event combining the most outstanding and promising works in the world’s contemporary cinema. Soon, it will also premiere in United States within the New Directors/New Films program of the MoMA, which new date is to be determined.
Camilo Restrepo was born in Medellin in 1975, and lives in Paris since 1999. Los conductos is his first feature film, presented after five short films: Tropic Pocket, Cómo crece la sombra cuando el sol declina, La Bouche, La impresión de una guerra and Cilaos, recognized and screened at several festivals, among which the Cannes Fifteen Filmmakers and the Toronto and New York festivals, receiving awards such as the Pardino d‘Argento at the Locarno Festival, previously directed by Carlo Chatrian, current director of the Berlinale.
“His short films are magnificent, with a remarkable formal sophistication and undoubted political relevance. You just have to see his last two works, in some way acclaimed at important festivals, to know he will soon surprise us with a greater work that will strengthen his position as filmmaker. There are a lot of films in the continent, but not all directors are filmmakers,” critic Roger Koza stated in 2017, who also anticipated Restrepo’s success: “From all the region’s filmmakers, he is the most promising to make the film nobody expects.”
Los conductos portrays the survival instincts of a character ready to fight for the liberation of a country, even a continent, mixing nightmares and hallucinations in contrast with reality.
