Nos están matando

Session Submission Type: Film

Abstract

Directors: Tom Laffay and Emily Wright.

As the world focuses on the demobilization of the FARC rebel group, another war is being waged on Colombia’s social leaders and human rights defenders – the very people key to building peace and shaping the new Colombia.
“Nos están matando” – “They’re killing us” – has become the cry of social movements across the country. The former head of Colombia’s victims’ unit, Alan Jara, described it as a ‘massacre in slow motion’ - referring to the 200 plus community leaders murdered since peace was signed in 2016. Activists are being targeted with impunity in the interests of territorial control, illegal mining and illicit crop cultivation.
Our film takes us to the department of Cauca, which bears a disproportionate share of that violence. For a year we followed two threatened human right defenders: Feliciano Valencia, an Indigenous Nasa community leader fighting for land rights and Héctor Marino, an Afro Descendent community leader trying to set up a community self-protection group – the Cimarron Guard.
In intimate, poignant scenes we demonstrate the stress and sacrifices these two men make on a daily basis to work for their community’s rights. By focusing on their personal lives we get behind the headlines and statistics (on average, one leader killed every four days) to see what is really at stake when peace is promised, but not delivered.
From inside bulletproof SUVs, on territory raids and marches with indigenous groups and joining funeral processions high in the mountains of Cauca, our film takes viewers into the real and deadly side of Colombia’s peace process.

Sub Track

• Film Festival