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Era Un Lunes (It was a Monday)
2018
Video, 24min, co-directed with Eduardo Kohn

Era un lunes is an experimental ethnographic film that draws us into the lives of a group of Colombian families who have fled across the Ecuadorean border to escape the ongoing violence in their country. Once in Ecuador, their stories—of what happened to them, of why they left and the violence they continue to experience—are often dismissed. The migrants are often told they are fabricating or exaggerating their stories. Such doubt is corrosive. It makes you wonder if the ground under your feet is actually stable. One woman in the film, in describing the day her father was assassinated, keeps repeating-- “That hill exists. That hill exists” –as if somehow the very hill was threatening to disappear. Using images of everyday life in their new home town of Quito, along with images from an ethnographic theatre piece documenting the events that led them to leave Colombia, Era un Lunes is an attempt to show what it is like to live in the shadow of a violent past that nobody seems to believe.

Era un lunes is an episodic film that tacks between scenes from the theatre piece and scenes from the everyday life of the migrants. It makes use of repetition—the voices from the theatre piece are heard repeating under everyday scenes of cooking and shopping and cleaning—to mimic the repetition of traumatic events in our memories.  Eschewing straightforward voiceover, the film allows the viewer to gradually come to understand, in a kind of slow-reveal, that we are watching a collective theatre group documenting aspects of their past.  Interspersed throughout the film and giving the film structure, are stanzas from a low-fi “dream-poem” about the civil war in Colombia—a lyrical poem dreamt and immediately spoken into a cell phone by one of the participants in the play during its production. At crucial moments, the film turns to interviews with the participants to understand how its production affected them and the meaning its scenes hold for them..

Screenings:
David Schneider Memorial Plenary of the Biennial Meeting of the Society for Cultural Anthropology, virtual conference based at Johns Hopkins University, Baltimore, 19 April 2018 (with Jason De Leon and Stephanie Spray; moderated by Anand Pandian).

Haverford College, April 11, 2018.

“Imagistic Fields: a Filmmaker Masterclass and Screening Series”, McGill University, Montreal, 6 December 2017 (discussion with Stephanie Spray).