In the community of Pogue, alabados—songs that guide the dead to purgatory—transform…
Our Song to War
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- Reviews
- Citation
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In the Colombian village of Bojayá, in 2002, FARC guerrillas committed a massacre. In this poetic, visually stunning film, the town emerges as a mysterious place where people sing as they guide the spirits across a mystic river. This death ritual, Novenario, is to ensure that the angry spirits of the dead don’t return—a reconciliation between the world of the living and the lost souls that roamed the Colombian landscape during 50 years of war.
"Exploring the territory of the village of Bojaya serves as the basis of the Colombian-Belgian filmmaker Juanita Onzaga’s narrative in Our Song to War– the perception of a reality permeated by the irrational, the persistence of archaic patterns, the survival of the sacred, all tied together by an exceptional sense of imagery." - Clermont Ferrand, Short film festival editorial
Citation
Main credits
Onzaga, Juanita (film director)
Onzaga, Juanita (film producer)
Stevens, Jan (film producer)
Despeer, Sofie (film producer)
Other credits
Cinematography & editing, Juanita Onzaga; music, Las Musas de Pogue.
Distributor subjects
Culture + Identity; Short Films; South America; Religion + Spirituality; Environment + Sustainability; Geography; Indigenous Peoples; Latin American Studies; AnthropologyKeywords
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How many steps can I walk
into the jungle
00:01:03.920 --> 00:01:05.420
before I disappear?
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Here we say
you have to be more careful
00:01:19.070 --> 00:01:21.720
with the living
than with the dead.
00:01:28.880 --> 00:01:30.660
When did the war start?
00:01:33.880 --> 00:01:35.360
Here nobody knows anymore.
00:01:35.720 --> 00:01:37.680
It has always been like this.
00:01:44.240 --> 00:01:47.680
Have you asked yourself
how it is to live a war?
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Behind our eyes,
remain the traces of our story,
00:02:00.040 --> 00:02:03.920
of a night and day
filled with bullets and fear.
00:02:06.360 --> 00:02:08.960
This place was our home.
00:02:10.340 --> 00:02:13.520
This church, our refuge.
00:02:15.200 --> 00:02:18.280
People call it the massacre of Bojaya.
00:02:18.880 --> 00:02:21.800
Here,
we don't name it anymore.
00:02:25.400 --> 00:02:28.060
These lands, these waters,
00:02:28.660 --> 00:02:31.280
don’t belong to war anymore.
00:02:34.920 --> 00:02:37.120
The waters of this river have told us:
00:02:37.600 --> 00:02:39.880
"only in the darkest nights,
00:02:40.360 --> 00:02:43.960
shall we find the reasons
to keep on fighting."
00:02:44.840 --> 00:02:50.320
Now, we have to take back from war
what has always belonged to us.
00:04:21.100 --> 00:04:24.660
My mom says
I can’t swim in the river at night.
00:04:25.740 --> 00:04:29.340
There are strange creatures
that can seize me forever.
00:04:31.140 --> 00:04:32.980
I asked her,
is it crocodiles?
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She said no,
it is something worse.
00:04:37.200 --> 00:04:39.760
What what can be worse
than a crocodile?
00:04:45.680 --> 00:04:47.440
Maybe a pirate?
00:04:56.820 --> 00:05:00.240
Sometimes I don’t go to school
and stay wandering in the harbor.
00:05:01.200 --> 00:05:04.360
If you look into
the swirling water
00:05:05.240 --> 00:05:08.600
deep inside appear eyes
that look back at you.
00:05:13.700 --> 00:05:15.500
I thought it was mermaids,
00:05:15.740 --> 00:05:17.300
but my granny told me once
00:05:17.500 --> 00:05:21.680
it’s the crocodile-men
living underwater like fish
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but during night time they come up
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and haunt little girls, like me.
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But what if there are lost souls
living inside the crocodile-men?
00:05:51.420 --> 00:05:53.560
What if they’re also inside the fish?
00:06:08.460 --> 00:06:10.100
Oh you killed it!
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You should have seen, he shot the stone
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and hit the lizard on the neck,
it did like this.
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I said "I have good aim"
and I threw it, bam!
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Are we gonna go fishing?
00:06:22.630 --> 00:06:24.630
But we're missing Walter!
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Let's go search for him
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I have to get my fish hook.
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Do you think there are fruits in here?
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There are the graves from the massacre.
00:06:57.480 --> 00:06:58.760
There are like 45, no?
00:06:58.930 --> 00:07:03.640
Did I tell you? The son of... Solito.
00:07:06.900 --> 00:07:09.480
He came here and saw a broken grave
00:07:09.680 --> 00:07:11.740
and took out a skull.
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That was Chuchito. Yeah with Cuchilin.
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They took it out,
it´s still there somewhere.
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It was that grave over there,
it´s all destroyed.
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I didn´t touch that skull.
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They were playing with it.
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Once by night
the owner of the skull appeared.
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I was sleeping,
I woke up and went to the toilet
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And something touched me like this,
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but there was nobody.
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So I went to my brother's bed
and slept with him.
00:07:46.640 --> 00:07:48.840
Another night
we were sleeping with my bro,
00:07:49.080 --> 00:07:51.880
and something pulled my bro up
like this, upwards,
00:07:52.280 --> 00:07:54.620
and I had to pull him back down!
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My brother flew up and then down,
it was so scary.
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I don´t know which being that was.
00:08:01.620 --> 00:08:04.880
All those nights
we didn´t have light at home.
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“Why did you have to go?”
that's how people cry here.
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I cry, but I don´t like crying.
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When I go to the Novenario ritual
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Where they are celebrating
the death of someone.
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Celebrating?
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You know what I mean.
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When they start singing I think,
why can't I sing like them?
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So I can also sing to my dead family,
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it makes me sad.
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“Ay! Why did you have to go,
I have loved you so much
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After we have cried for you,
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in this world
there shouldn't be dead anymore.
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You that we need,
please get up from your grave.”
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I don't know which
are the graves of my family.
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There is my family, just in front.
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Well, I don't know
where my dead are.
00:10:38.460 --> 00:10:42.000
One day a man died.
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The people of the village
did the Novenario ritual
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and the cantaoras started singing.
00:10:51.500 --> 00:10:57.260
His grandson looked down
and saw that the water started rising.
00:10:58.260 --> 00:11:03.800
So he asked his grandma,
"Granny, why does the water rise?"
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She answered
“Son, when we start singing,
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the spirit arrives here,
he drinks the water because he is tired,
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and then he floats over the river
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towards the afterlife."
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It makes me be scared
and enfolds my heart
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seeing myself dead and lying
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in the center of my house.
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I know tomorrow I will go
from this world into the next one.
Distributor: Pragda Films
Length: 14 minutes
Date: 2018
Genre: Expository
Language: Spanish
Grade: Middle School, High School, College, Adult
Color/BW:
Closed Captioning: Available
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