Rá, Culebro, Sere, Winny and Nano are five lost children. They are looking for their Neverland, their little piece of land where they can be free. Where they let them be happy and at peace. Where violence is not the only way to survive in a world where inequality pushes them to the margins. They live in Medellin. They survive by stealing and dealing but, like the protagonists in James Matthew Barrie’s work, they find themselves in a limbo where they are neither children nor adults. They are abandoned. No maternal or paternal references. The arrival of a notification that one of them has inherited land from his grandmother, due to the restitution begun years ago by the Colombian government, is the beginning of a journey through the areas of the country that the cinema never shows.
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They are the protagonists of The Kings of the world, the moving, beautiful and hard film by Laura Mora with which she won the Golden Shell at the San Sebastián Film Festival in the last edition and which can now be seen in theaters. The poetry that she was able to extract from the violence in her country, her ability to analyze latent conflicts without renouncing beauty, and the way in which she looked into the eyes of those forgotten by fiction moved everyone. Cinema marked by the land, but universal cinema.
The land is also one of the central themes of his film, but it serves as a metaphor for his own country. “The land issue is the neuralgic point of the Colombian conflict, it is its principle, it is rooted in the land, it is a great historical debt. I think it is a metaphor for the country, but I also feel that it could be a metaphor for the world, for a capitalist system that we are living in its wildest version. Extraction, global warming, violence… More and more people are being expelled, pushed outside the walls and are being forced to move. I feel that it is a film that also talks about internal migration, but that it is still a movement to survive or to be better. In this sense, the film is a particular metaphor for Colombia with the theme of restitution, but it also ends up talking about the world”, says Mora from the editorial staff of elDiario.es.
A cinema that approaches “the margins, where they tell us that there is no beauty”. “I am interested in the forgotten, I am interested in the nobody”, says the director who always tries to offer a “vision of the world that is as little Manichean as possible”. The Kings of the world has many links in common with his previous film, kill jesus where he used his own experience (his father was murdered in Medellín) to try to understand what was happening so that violence was beating in the streets: “One of my obsessions is justice. And justice has to do with excess inequality. Colombia is the second most unequal country in Latin America after Haiti, and that is an absolutely unfair social construction.”
The two works address how something as random as where you are born marks, something that “can be a sentence”: “If you are born in a certain context, it is very possible that your life is condemned to that context. The possibility of changing it is very difficult. I, who am more of an agnostic than a believer, feel that chance plays a very definitive role here and I am interested in investigating these issues”.
Its protagonists find themselves in no man’s land. Also in his vital moment. They are children who behave by imitating the masculine and violent patterns they have observed, but who have flashes of tenderness and innocence. Mora uses it to reflect on a topic that particularly interests her: “Masculinity worries me a lot. As a woman, and as a woman who has grown up in an extremely violent context, also understanding violence as a very masculine heritage. I am interested in that kind of sentence that being a man means, especially in certain contexts where being a man means having a series of behaviors that are generally associated with violence in order to survive”.
Masculinity worries me a lot. As a woman, and as a woman who has grown up in an extremely violent context, also understanding violence as a very masculine heritage
Laura Mora
— Film director
It distances itself from the normal representation that cinema makes of these bodies, where “the fragility and tenderness are removed from them”. “I have grown up in a very masculine world, I have been very close to these boys. Many of them, who are in the film, I have known for a long time and I have seen them be incredibly sweet and generous and caring, and I wanted that to be very present. They have been forced to grow up so fast that being a child is also a kind of revenge, because to take revenge on the world they continue to be children and do evil, ”he adds.
Mora achieves beautiful moments despite the harshness of what she narrates. “For me, the only way to overcome violence has been by finding beauty, because Colombia is a very difficult country. Violence has hit me very directly. I have been very sensitive to the environment in which I have grown up. So, the only possibility of overcoming that pain has been finding beauty. And I think that this abstraction that the poetic place proposes lets you be or lets you interpret. That space of freedom that for me is very necessary and I think that is what I like the most in cinema, the possibility of the image; that can seem like nothing and be everything at the same time”, she recounts.
This mix materializes in a scene that makes your hair stand on end: the encounter of the protagonists with some prostitutes in an abandoned brothel. They embrace them looking for the absent mother, and they embrace them finding the children lost in the violence. A moment that was thought through to the last detail: “What I wanted to build was a homeland with some women who are a bit forgotten, who are beaten up. Not only do they find a mother’s embrace, but they also find the lost children. Colombia is a motherland, there are a lot of women who have survived the conflict, who have lost their children in the war, or their partners, and who have had to continue alone, and who, despite being so hurt, are deeply generous. ”.
The end, with a fade to black and background noise left to the viewer’s imagination, can be read in many ways, but always pessimistic. Laura Mora confesses that she is not optimistic, but that she does have a lot of hope. “I think that they are two very different concepts and that optimism calls for a happy ending, and that is what I did not do. But hope can ask us questions about good and evil and perhaps prepare us to build something better. So, in that sense, I like the word hope, because it has more to do with utopia, but it also includes defeat. It seems to me that optimism is only a momentary emotion, whereas if I didn’t have hope, I wouldn’t make the movies that I do”, she analyzes.
Its five protagonists took a plane for the first time to go to San Sebastián. They had not seen the sea, and for them it was an adventure, but also a risk. Then they had to go back to their real life. To the streets of Medellin. The director explains how this was something they were told from the beginning of the shoot. They have carried out a psychosocial monitoring of each one that has continued after the Golden Shell: “They were surprised by the treatment of the people, they said that one could go here at night in peace, and it is good that they realize that the world can work in other ways. I believe that we all deserve a great anecdote, a great adventure and to see that the world is much bigger”.