Profiles: Jaime Osorio Márquez | Proimágenes Colombia

A director and screenwriter for film, advertising, and television, Osorio has a filmography that seeks to push the limits of genre film in Colombia. His feature debut, El Páramo, received the Citizen Kane award for Best Breakthrough Director at the Fantastic Film Festival in Sitges, Spain, the largest fantastic film festival in the world, and the Best Ibero-American Script at the Guadalajara International Film Festival (FICG).
 
Jaime Osorio Márquez was born October 30, 1975, in Cali, Colombia. Between 1995 and 1999, he received DEUG, Licence, and Maitrise degrees in Arts du Spectacle Mention Études Cinématographiques at the Université de Rennes II in France. In 2000, he returned to Colombia and began directing commercials for companies such as Teleset (a subsidiary of Sony Pictures Television International), República Films, Los Sopranos in Venezuela, and Rhayuela Films. He has directed important ad campaigns for Avianca, Chevrolet, Coca-Cola, Yoplait, Alpina, McDonald’s, Nestlé, and Newell Sanford, in addition to winning awards in the Nova and Caribe festivals. In Colombia, he is acknowledged for his ability to create tension and drama onscreen.
 
In 2011, he wrote and directed his feature debut El Páramo, produced by Rhayuela Cine in co-production with Alta Films (Spain) and Sudestada (Argentina), with Wild Bunch (Pan’s Labyrinth, The Orphanage) taking over international sales. The distributor bought the rights to the film while it was in its first week of shooting and later distributed it in multiple countries, including the United Kingdom, Germany, Japan, Turkey, Thailand, and Taiwan.
 
“El Páramo, being a genre film that operates within some of the parameters of classic horror, seeks not only to provoke an immediate reaction but to invite the viewer to reflection. Fear and the guerrilla are equivalents that morph into symbols of the fear and paranoia that currently reign. From this starting point, the story evolves on two fronts. The first, expressly narrative, is the gradual shift from a war movie to a horror film. The second, at a much more psychological level, is about how men are forced to face their own ghosts as the enemy predetermined by society is diluted in uncertainty,” says Osorio about his first film.
 
His second feature film, Siete cabezas (2017), had its world premiere at the 33. Warsaw Film Festival. He describes it as, “more daring in the narrative sense. I’m not trying to make scenes effective and emotional. I’m trying for each of the elements of the tale to slowly take hold of the spectator to create the feeling of desolation that must accompany the end of the world. El Páramo prepared me for anything. Not only were we shooting at 4000 meters but we did so without a storyboard or a technical script and we improvised alongside the actors who were never given a script. In Siete Cabezas, although we also shot in grueling conditions, the challenges were different. The biggest one was to shoot the film in the short time we had available.”
 
In 2011, he directed El Laberinto for Caracol Televisión in coproduction with Sony International. His filmography includes the work he did while studying in Paris, where he directed the short film J’attends and the nonfiction short A Deux Mains, based on texts by Godard. Also while in France he directed the theater play Woyzeck by Buchner and participated in the scenography for L´inspecteur Général, based on the play The Inspector General by Gogol.
 
Between 2013 and 2017 he wrote the feature film Mostro (aka ASILO) and the first season of a television series to be shot in 2018.

October 2017