Letterboxd — Your life in film

This is a very special and personal film to me. My husband and I tried to move to Colombia in 1993 with our two girls. When we were just ready to buy a farm land, exactly like the one depicted in this film ( I wish I could put a picture here), I met a veterinarian in the little bled below. That night we were celebrating our decision to buy this beautiful house on a farm land on top of the mountains in the country side half way between Medellin and Pereira. We had ideas of living the farm life raising our girls with the people - we wanted to share and help with everything we had, and set up a coop. Between two bottles of rum, the vet told me that night, that we were naive and we would get a bullet in the head in no time with our silly ideas. The week after, we decided to signed out of the deal. We knew he was right, we knew that in no time we would be considered "resistantes" or "desertors" to the "majordomos" and the paramilitaries and rapidly eliminated. Fifteen years later, my husband went back on his own to pursue his dream, bought a farm land in the mountains of Colombia close to the Venezuela border by the Carabian sea. My daughters went to visit him that summer of 2010. Not long after they came back in September, he disappeared. We never heard of him, or found his body. Just before he disappeared, we spoke on the phone and he told me he was part of a little fishmen group who wanted to "change things" (no, it was not the guerrilla). He told me how he found difficult to reintegrate his own country, much more then he had thought, how fishermen were starving, how he couldn't do or keep anything from the crop on his farm land. He cried and begged me to send him money to help. And I did.

No use to say, this film made me relive parts of our life, our hopes and our dreams of the time. But most of all, it gave me an explanation of what probably happen to him, like millions of civilians in that beautiful country. I can't help to think -what a shame - if only the peasant could be left alone. There is so much out there - enough for no one to starve. They have everything to be happy.

Rest in peace Alejandro.

P.S. My daughters and I also gave a set of colour pencils to a little girl the day we visited the house. I like to think that maybe they inspired the title of this film...