Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship: Simon Uribe

The Foundation is proud to share a trailer and blog post from Dr. Simon Uribe who received a Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship to aid filmmaking on Frontier Infrastructures.

SUSPENSIÓN_TEASER_Abril2018_Subt_INGLES from PAUSAR on Vimeo.

Frontier Infrastructures

Fejos Postdoctoral Fellowship

In October 2015, I was awarded the Fejos Fellowship in ethnographic film to support the project “Frontier Infrastructures”. This project originated form my PhD research, originally conceived as a history and ethnography of transport infrastructure in the Colombian Amazon (the results of this research were recently published in the book Frontier Road: Power, history, and the everyday state in the Colombian Amazon, Wiley-Blackwell 2017). As stated in the project’s preliminary abstract, “Frontier infrastructures” sought to explore the material, affective and moral relationship between humans and transport infrastructures in the Colombian Amazon. Specifically, the film would follow different persons in their everyday journeys across various man-made and natural infrastructures (roads, rivers, trails) in order to explore and interrogate the different ways in which they make sense of their past, present, and possible futures through the perceived and lived realities that such infrastructures embody or symbolize.

Although the central aim of the project has remained the same, the film’s story and plot have undergone substantial changes for different events and circumstances that we (myself and the film crew that has collaborated in the conception and materialization of the project) encountered during the last two and a half years.

The first turn in the project had to do with an event during an early trip in December 2015 aimed at selecting locations and characters for the film. In the middle of this trip we came across a scene –the building of a large concrete bridge part of a large road project- that would later become a central feature in the story. At that point, we decided that we would follow workers, engineers and contractors for a period of time in order to capture their material and affective relations with infrastructure. During the next eight months we carried out two film trips, basically following the everyday life of the road project.

In January 2017 we traveled to the Putumayo for a final three-month period of filming. At that time, we found that works were indefinitely suspended due to lack of funding, so our daily routine became now to capture all sorts of situations that emerge in a road project that seems to go nowhere (it was also in that moment that the film acquired its current and final title: Suspensión). A few days before leaving the Putumayo, however, a tragic event that affected us in several and unexpected ways took place. In March 31st , a torrential flash flood hit Mocoa (capital of Putumayo) killing around 400 people and leaving several parts of the city totally destroyed, including the house where we were living. We managed to recover the film material recorded during those months but lost equipment and other goods. Sadly, Guillermo, the film’s central character, died in the event.

The March 31st event forced us to reconsider several aspects of the film, yet it also reassured our commitment to bring the project to completion. In September 2017 we were granted a very prestigious grant from Colombia’s Film Development Fund (FDC), which provided the required funds to carry out two more film trips and to cover the post-production costs. This grant also allows us to access different film festivals and distribution markets for the next two years. Last February, for instance, we attended the co-production market at the Berlinale, an important event for documentary film-makers worldwide. We hope to attend similar events in the near future in order to secure the widest audience possible for the film. Also, I will show some parts of the film and discuss the project next June in Princeton’s Institute of Advanced Studies Summer School of Social Sciences, to which I was selected as fellow together with a small group of scholars from Latin America, Africa, and the Middle East.