I saw this film during the 5th Panorama du cinéma colombien, held in Paris from 11 to 17 october 2017. It is the second film of the colombian filmmaker Juan Andrés Arango.
I met Juan Andrés through two schoolmates who had gone to Bogotá to study cinema at the Universidad nacional de Colombia, in Bogotá. At that time, they were preparing a theater play, Caligula, from Albert Camus, and Juan Andrés had been chosen to play the role of Caligula. To incarnate Caligula, it was necessary to have a really expressive soul. And I don’t think it was a mistake to choose him for the role.
After watching this film for the first time, I’ve been thinking about the situations of violence that must be faced by its three protagonists. The film tells the story of three different characters, three young people in Colombia, Mexico and Canada who are going through a process of transformation driven by the experience of migration and youth. They also have to face this situations of violence that Juan Andrés has transcribed from reality to the film. For him, this situations are rooted in the places were the story takes place, and they remains secondary in his creative process, that is centered on reflections about migration and youth. But it also happens that violence is an omnipresent element in Latin American cinematography, and I am also convinced that it is not possible to make a simple transposition of violence from reality to fiction.
The point is that violence, whether in real life or in fiction, is an energy that tends to prevail in the development of any story. So, when violence appears in a film, it can determined its entire development. So my question is: to what extent the stories told in X 500 have been preserved from the outbreak of violence? Personally, I am convinced that Juan Andrés has managed to find a formula to “defuse” the intransigent nature of violence, even if he does not seem to be aware of it.
Suddenly it appears to me that this issue may well become a more general analysis perspective, so that we could explore in Latin American cinema all the filmic treatments of violence, and especially those that manage to disarm its inexorable character.