The tropical climate envelops a small hill. At home, Anselmo, a ten-year-old boy who has been murdered by his young father, has just been scolded by his mother. Annoyed, he sets out for the river. The child jumps and plunges into the water. When trying to return to the surface, he finds himself surprisingly with a corpse floating in the weeds. The body begins to be taken by the current and, before the dilemma of returning or not to house, Anselmo decides to chase the body that goes away downstream. During his two-day journey with his nights, Anselmo witnesses what the riparian villagers do with the corpse. His experience exposes him to a tragic reality that awakens in him the confusion and that little by little will provoke his compassion towards the corpse, this will induce him to perform an act of piety and at the same time will necessarily turn him into a small adult. Epifanio is a 50-year-old farmer, who works in tillage, sleeps alone in his house, and has a mule and a dog for company. He lives in the cold climate of the mountains and his two closest neighbors are Blanca and Alcides, with whom he lives in peace. But recently the conditions of violence in the country have reached the area, and the threat of an increasingly close attack is beginning to be felt. This is the story of a child who becomes an adult when he discovers the closeness of violent death and its consequences in an area of ​​conflict and is also the careful portrayal of a gentle peasant who is attacked and killed. Two parallel representations are united from the finding, on the part of Anselmo, of the corpse of Epifanio.

“El Silencio del Rio” A . film by Carlos Tribiño.  My work as Production designer and Art director, it’s on this book. The film was the winner of the 55 FICCI, film festival.

These are two stories, that of Anselmo the child and that of Epifanio, the man, who narrated in blocks and in parallel give account of a specific context of violence that Colombia has been suffering for a long time in certain rural areas away from any medium population . It is a look that reviews the consequences of certain acts of violence, acts and situations, which in turn, generate in the living certain forms of behavior that allow them to continue with their daily lives and their way of surviving.

Through Anselmo, the story seeks to approach situations that leave traces of violence in the idiosyncrasies of the inhabitants of the banks of Colombian rivers. Situations in which people must assume the problem of meeting a corpse and what is owed, or better, what should be done with it. Anselmo will know firsthand these behaviors and face the reality that presents this environment, then ask about what he sees and somehow turn to the transformation of his own personality in view of these experiences not catalogable in his early life. This is a story where there are no violent acts and from the point of view of a child, addresses the issue of the human condition in some parts of the Colombian geography, where at certain times many corpses descended by some rivers. Anselmo, from this experience, will fulfill the mourning for his missing father and will somehow become a small adult.

On the other hand is Epifanio, the peasant of high mountains. This story seeks to portray some of the victims of the armed conflict. Simple people, who live on land or some business and who suffer total abandonment of the state, and yet live peacefully and resist not to be stripped of their land and having to flee or be murdered atrociously. This narrative does not use literal and physical violence, it does not show the violent act itself, but focuses on the peasant characters, who they are, how they live and where and how they are terrified by groups that Violate violence. This story is an approach to the individual to know him and understand his situation. But it is also the resignation, the waiting before the inevitable, the impotence and the pain. In addition it is the horror, the one that feels and with which one has to coexist.