The history of the 16 communes of the Colombian city of Medellin is full of difficulties, the legacy of the great drug lords.
However, what once operated in a hierarchical manner, today operates through groups outside the law. And despite the circumstances, many of them seek to offer a Robin Hood profile and try to help the neighborhoods where they grew up to promote the development of their communes.
For this reason, these two directors, one Venezuelan and the other Colombian, took on the task of making an X-ray of the city through their feature film ‘looking for america‘, to explore and represent the true realities impregnated in the streets of the communes. Realities that are often not reflected beyond the Colombian borders.
“For us it is important that if we were going to talk about a film that touches certain realities in Latin America, that we be part of those realities. Not only, obviously living them as Alex lived them, but me coming from abroad, ”he told the voice of america Nelson Navarrete, director of ‘looking for america‘.
Navarrete, a director who emigrated from Venezuela to Los Angeles at the age of 15, and Alex Ulises, a well-known director from Medellín, decided to develop a feature film to explore and represent these realities impregnated in the streets of the communes.
“The highest number of Venezuelan migrants is to Colombia. So we wanted to focus on that character and what a character lives as such and what it means for that person to move to another country and how that Colombian-Venezuelan culture shares many realities?” Navarrete explained.
According to the filmmakers, the feature film will also be an experiment in which they will try to use the innovative tools offered by Web3 to create a real social impact.
“The social impact that we want to have, not only with Web3, but accompanied by Web3, is to provide some tools in the communities that we visit, where we find these actors who are going to participate in our film, where we can teach production workshops, workshops performance and Web3 workshops where we teach how to use certain tools for this new technology”, said Navarrete.
The foundership
One of the tools to finance these efforts is the sale of non-fungible tokens, known as NFTs for its acronym in English.
“In the part of the collection, what we want is to generate a genesis that first creates a community for us. With more distant features we would even like to achieve interactions, for example if you have a collection of photos you will realize certain things that happen in the film that someone who does not have the collection of those photos could not identify”, said Alex Ulises to VOA.
Likewise, the director emphasized the financial limitations faced by artists in Latin America and the benefits of a decentralized structure such as that of Web3.
“Creative artists see ourselves as very limited by the opinions of what is already established. So imagine that we are in a system where making a free press is impossible from the outset. Making free movies is quite controversial in Latin America because they censor you. So the simple fact that these narratives are decentralized generates a kind of freedom of knowing that we are going to find visibility in other formats and in other spaces”, explained Alex Ulises.
And in turn, the directors explain, they will also develop a new financing system for future generations of filmmakers.
“All the time the premise is ‘how do we live from cinema and from these current cinematographic narratives?’ So we want to leave a kind of Bible within that construction. Don’t take it selfishly. In other words, it is not limited to how we did it and keep that information to ourselves. On the contrary, to generate a route that makes it easier for the new Latin American generations to understand these new financing models that generally frustrate us”, added Alex Ulises.
“Our Web 3 movie is already developed in a way that is kind of aggressive against the system. We are a bridge for development and an example of what the cinema of the future can be”, concluded Navarrete.
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