Como crece la sombra cuando el sol declina

Medellin. Tireless car traffic. In the margins of a society launched at top speed, some lurking engines shutdown to make a living; Jugglers at intersections, employees on breaks, whose precise and repetitive work mark the flow of time which is always repeated.

Introduction

Like Shadows Growing as the Sun Goes Down shows the city of Medellin from the point of view of some marginal inhabitants: traffic light jugglers, employees of a car boning garage.

The starting point of the film was to bring together the gestures – all circular, all cyclical – of those people who work when the cars stop (at traffic lights, at the end of their working life). It is a film about those who do not move forward, where slow and repetition prevail over speed. The car, the main protagonist, is always off-camera.

As I was filming, I understood that another opposition was drawn: manual work against the machine. This opposition resonated with my own practice as a filmmaker, giving priority to the use of film – which I developed, cut and pasted until I made the projection copy in the associative laboratory L’Abominable.

The title comes from my interest in the urban and historical layout of the city, marked by the names of the heroes and the great battles of The Independence. It comes from a phrase that celebrates the glory of Simon Bolivar: “With the passing of the centuries, your glory will grow as the shadow grows when the sun declines”. Walking through the streets with the jugglers, I was aware that we were moving in a vast space, expanded by time: the terrain of a stratified society where the past and the present do not stop meeting.