New York’s Anthology Film Archive has announced the special retrospective series “Listen, Look!: The Films of Luis Ospina” to take place October 7-18 in New York City. Following on from Anthology Film Archive’s September tribute to Colombian-American artist Karen Lamassonne, who was a participant in the Grupo de Cali (Cali Group) that formed in Colombia in the 1980s, the prestigious film center presents a retrospective devoted to one of the Group’s central figures: Luis Ospina.
Ospina, who passed away in 2019, directed numerous films—fictional, documentary, experimental, and hybrid; both alone and in collaboration with filmmakers and artists including Carlos Mayolo, Andrés Caicedo, Jorge Nieto, and Lamassonne—and was also a tireless force in Colombian cinema as a film critic and the founder and director of the Cali International Film Festival (FICCALI).
His best known films abroad are The Vampires of Poverty / Agarrando pueblo (1978), a ground-breaking, satirical mockumentary that demonstrated his and Mayolo’s critique of documentary cinema’s exploitation of third-world suffering (which they dubbed “poverty porn”), and Pure Blood / Pura sangre (1982), a fictional feature that uses the metaphor of vampirism to critique capitalism in Latin America.
This retrospective includes both those classic works, as well as a wide-ranging selection of experimental and documentary films from throughout his career. Taken together, these works reveal Ospina as a filmmaker with a razor-sharp socio-political vision, an openness to radically different formal approaches, a profound engagement with the history of the cinema, and, perhaps above all, a dedication to the cultural life and artistic communities of Colombia—as evidenced by his filmic portraits of both Cali itself and of friends and collaborators such as the writers Andrés Caicedo and Fernando Vallejo and artists Lorenzo Jaramillo and Pedro Manrique Figueroa.
