Luis Ospina, interviewed shortly before his death, recalls a fierce career that applied the lessons of the French New Wave to his work
Jorge Carvalho’s brief documentary is a study of the Colombian documentarist and film-maker Luis Ospina, the founder of the Grupo de Cali; named after his home town of Cali in Colombia, it was an artists’ collective including director Carlos Mayolo and the writer Andrés Caicedo, whose early death at 25 helped make him a legendary figure of Colombian literature. They were formed in radical opposition to what Ospina and others saw as the dullness and complacency of Colombian cinema, and in sympathy with leftist currents in moviemaking after Godard. The Californian-educated Ospina himself displays a classic New Wave reverence for the American masters such as Hawks and Ford, in whose company he includes Jerry Lewis without any hesitation. Ospina and the Grupo de Cali were the subject of a retrospective at London’s Tate Modern in 2014.
These interviews with Ospina were conducted in Lisbon in 2018, just one year before his death and in truth, the man himself is a little subdued with age and ill-health. But this documentary certainly gives a taste of the vehemence and boldness of his work. Ospina was a fierce critic of the Escobar-isation of his native land but confesses readily enough to have sampled a great deal of Escobar’s product in his younger days.
