Ospina Cali Colombia review – giant of Latin American activist cinema explains himself
Jorge Carvalho’s brief documentary is a study of the Colombian documentarist and film-maker Luis Ospina, the founder of the Grupo de Cali; named after his home town of Cali in Colombia, it was an artists’ collective including director Carlos Mayolo and the writer Andrés Caicedo, whose early death at 25 helped make him a legendary figure of Colombian literature. They were formed in radical opposition to what Ospina and others saw as the dullness and complacency of Colombian cinema, and in sympathy with leftist currents in moviemaking after Godard. The Californian-educated Ospina himself displays a classic New Wave reverence for the American masters such as Hawks and Ford, in whose company he includes Jerry Lewis without any hesitation. Ospina and the Grupo de Cali were the subject of a retrospective at London’s Tate Modern in 2014.
These interviews with Ospina were conducted in Lisbon in 2018, just one year before his death and in truth, the man himself is a little subdued with age and ill-health. But this documentary certainly gives a taste of the vehemence and boldness of his work. Ospina was a fierce critic of the Escobar-isation of his native land but confesses readily enough to have sampled a great deal of Escobar’s product in his younger days.
Carvalho prominently shows us two cult classics. One is Ospina’s anarchic 27-minute mockumentary Agarrando Pueblo, or Grabbing People (from 1978 and released under the title The Vampires of Poverty), in which a spoof German camera crew cruises around Cali outrageously trying to stage scenes of Latin American poverty porn for a European TV audience, a film that includes onlookers’ genuine rage-filled indignation. There is also his Pura Sangre, another vampire satire about the parasitism of capitalism: a rich old plutocrat suffering from an obscure blood condition needs regular infusions of blood from young men.
Ospina felt that cinema itself tended to feed on its subjects, and his attitude to documentary was always complex. It’s a valuable primer on an important figure in contemporary Colombian culture.
• Ospina Cali Colombia is at the ICA, London, from 17 May.