Colombia's Camilo Restrepo Wins Berlinale's First Feature Award for LOS CONDUCTOS

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Colombian filmmaker Camilo Restrepo was the winner of the GWFF Best First Feature Award, with a cash prize of €50,000, at the 70th edition of the Berlin Film Festival for Los Conductos, which had its world premiere in the inaugural edition of the Encounters sidebar of the festival.

Produced by Helen Olive, Martin Bertier, and Felipe Guerrero, the film follows Pinky, who is on the run. At night the empty streets smell of the apocalypse and the city seems to be on fire. Narcotics swirl through the veins and the air. Having freed himself from the clutches of a sect led by a certain “padre” and determined to take his fate into his own hands, he is now holed up in an illegal T-shirt factory, surrounded by paints, slogans and heat presses. Pinky is looking for the light at the end of the tunnel, but ghosts are breathing down his neck. He is running for his life, and Colombia is on fire. But Colombia is alive.

After his highly promising short films, Restrepo has now made a debut feature that is as visionary, physical and elastic as the 16mm celluloid on which it was shot. The deeper Los conductos dives into the nightmarish and the hallucinatory, the tougher, more political and hungrier for reality the film becomes. In a narrative downward spiral, it conveys with the utmost precision the survival instincts of a character who is unwittingly fighting to liberate an entire country, perhaps even a continent. Restrepo uses the medium of cinema to transform an allegorical exploration of one’s roots into an irrepressible desire to change the world.

The 70th edition of the Berlinale took place February 20 - March 1 in Germany.