between love and pain

After a long time without being able to write, Laura Mora, the film director that many look at these days, saw Medellín from a mountain, and there she talked with a young man her own age about music, soccer and other shallow topics. Suddenly he tells her: “Jesus called me and I killed your dad.”

When he woke up from the dream, he wrote almost 50 pages in a row. At that time, she worked as a waitress and studied cinema, in Australia, she was not yet that director that many want to know about, and those conversations between her and her father’s murderer became Killing Jesus, the film prior to Los reyes of the world, and for which his name began to be more valued and known.

It may interest you: “The kings of the world” won the highest award at the San Sebastian Film Festival

Her taste for movies and stories began at home, a place where she lived with a family sensitive to the situation in the country, and with a mother who took her to see movies in rooms that some considered “rare” for showing non-traditional stories. Punk, studying and her friends allowed her to gain strength, to continue, after the death of her father. The cinema, especially, has allowed her to investigate the contradiction between which she has moved: “between love for life and hatred for the situations of the world”.

The film “The Kings of the World” opens this Thursday, October 13, in Colombia.

And that duality or contradiction is assumed and lived at any time. As it happened one day, when she was doing a pre-production job in the Manrique neighborhood, and when the lights came on, she started to cry. She responded about the reason: “It is that my life will not be enough to tell it.”

He believes that cinema is “a chance to look at the world through someone else’s eyes. I feed my gaze with many conversations, a lot of curiosity about the human condition, a lot of love for life and a lot of pain for the world. I nourish my gaze by watching movies and reading, approaching art, and the aesthetic experiences that I feel are a form of spirituality. I also nourish my gaze with contemplation and movement”.

The process of making The Kings of the World is summed up in an image: a door about to close, and through which he manages to enter, before the absolute closure. The pandemic and the illness of the actors, the tensions of the national strike and the warnings from people not to record in Bajo Cauca were some of the situations that he experienced with this film. None stopped her from continuing: “They told us not to shoot there and doing so was a subversive act. In that territory we find love, solidarity and beauty.”

The award for the best film, in the San Sebastian Film Festival, Spain, arrives after dilemmas, studying cinema and having “difficult months in intimate matters”. He believes that The Kings of the World can provide an approach “perhaps, hopefully, very authentic, to the questions we have asked ourselves about the conflict. To the local cinema as a way of producing, to the fact of surrounding oneself with people that one loves and admires and embarks on an adventure for a long time, in order to shoot a film. I think it can contribute as a project of enormous determination, passion and discipline, to what we are as a society”.

Rather than pointing the finger at a particular message, he would like the film to generate a lot of emotions, which the viewer then has to reflect on.
The near future is clear: enjoy what is happening now with The Kings of the World. Add to this “a couple of series that are already filming” and produce Daniela Abad’s first fiction film. She wants to make movies, surrounded by people who enjoy it as she does, and who understand or seek to understand what it means to move between love and pain.

The kings of the world: a different story

For Rá, Culebro, Sere, Winny & Nano, the street is the place they recognize, until
decide to undertake a journey through Bajo Cauca in Antioquia to reclaim a land that
was taken from the grandmother of one of them. They are the main characters in Los reyes
in the world, the new film by director Laura Mora, which opens this Thursday, the 13th of
october.

In his previous movie, Laura Mora was in contact with guys who practice gravity biking
in Medellin. This sport is known as whipping and consists of rolling at high speed along the
road, on bicycles assembled by themselves. Since then, she knew that there was
something special in that group of young people. He also saw a very particular relationship with the
risk, with adrenaline and with life.

The Kings of the World is produced by Ciudad Lunar Producciones and La Selva Cine, in
co-production with Iris Productions (Luxembourg), Tu Vas Voir (France), Mer Films
(Norway), Talipot Studio (Mexico), in association with Caracol Televisión, Dago García, Exile
Content. Distribution in Colombia is done by Cinecolor and international sales are
by Film Factory.

between love and pain