Profiles: Camilo Restrepo | Proimágenes Colombia

Camilo Restrepo was born in Medellín, Colombia in 1975. In 1999, at the age of 22, he moved to Paris, France, where he currently lives. He is a member of L'Abominable, an independent laboratory of filmmakers working on celluloid. His films have twice won the Pardino de Oro at the Locarno International Film Festival and have participated in the Directors' Fortnight at the Cannes Film Festival and the Toronto and New York festivals. With Los conductos he received the Encounters Award for Best Ópera Prima at the 2020 Berlin Film Festival.

In 1998 he finished his studies as a Master in Plastic Arts at the National University of Colombia and in 2004, at l'École Supérieure des Beaux-Arts in Paris. He has been director of the short films Tropic Pocket (2011), Cómo crece la sombra cuando el sol declina (2014), he was awarded the Pardino D'argento at the Locarno Festival for his short films La impresión de una guerra (2015) and Cilaos (2016), which have also been part of the collection of educational institutions such as Harvard, Princeton, Duke University, among others. Finally, La Bouche (2017) premiered at the Directors' Fortnight of the Cannes Film Festival in 2017.

The Colombian took the award for Best Ópera Prima at the 70th edition of the Berlin International Film Festival for Los conductos (2020), which premiered in the Encounters section, a new competition that was launched with a new platform to celebrate works that take risks from independent filmmakers who bet on different aesthetic perspectives and new structures. Encounters takes place in parallel to the Official Selection of the festival.

Los conductos was produced by Helen Olive and Martín Bertier, from 5à7 Films (France) and Felipe Guerrero, from Mutokino (Colombia). It's a fiction that follows Pinky, a man fleeing a religious sect, finding a place of refuge and a job in an illegal T-shirt factory. The idea was born from the story of his friend Pinky, who plays his own character in the film and who desired revenge and the intention to avoid the indoctrination of other young people like him.
 
"The film is loosely based on aspects of the life of my friend Pinky, who plays the lead role. Pinky actually spent several years in a religious sect under the orders of a guru who called himself the Father. When Pinky managed to escape the cult, he was left with the fixed idea that his duty was to kill the Father if the opportunity ever presented itself. Beyond his quest for revenge, Pinky thought of avoiding the indoctrination of other young people like him."
 
The film crosses over from nightmare to hallucination, while increasingly becoming more political in exploring its own reality. It is a reflection of the very character of its audiovisual work in general in which "audiovisual image is linked to traces of testimonies, bodies, and spaces as well as the experimentation and intervention of various film formats and found footage. Its view (political, radical and interdisciplinary) contributes to contemporary reflections on the ways of making film".(Retrospective presentation Cinemateca de Bogota 2021).
 
Last updated: May 2021