Guerilla des Farc, l'avenir a une histoire

In Guerilla des Farc, l'avenir a une histoire, seasoned French documentarian Pierre Carles offers an immersive, illuminating survey of the Fuerzas Armadas Revolucionarias de Colombia (FARC), a guerrilla organisation fighting the Colombian state for land rights since the 1960s. Comprising of footage shot by the filmmaker and the militants themselves, Guerilla des Farc is structured as a letter to Carles’ late stepfather Dunav Kuzmanich, the Chilean filmmaker behind Canaguaro (1981), an early film sympathetic to the FARC’s cause.

Spanning ten years, from the beginning of the FARC’s peace negotiations in 2012 to the recent election of ex-guerrilla Gustavo Petro as Colombia’s president, Carles’ film charts the incredible evolution of a revolutionary movement: from persecution and demonisation to disarmament and constitutional power. 

Interspersed with a historical view of the FARC are vignettes from the day-to-day life of the guerrillas, whom we see cooking, washing and weaving hammocks in the forest. This remarkable synthesis of the epic and the intimate is reinforced by the film’s touching emphasis on the civilian life of the combatants after disarmament: the struggles of peacetime turn out to be no less daunting than those of armed conflict. Carles’ pensive and poignant film shows that reconciliation comes at a price.

– Srikanth Srinivasan