Stories from Cabo Corrientes
Around Cabo Corrientes in the department of Chocó, where the jungle mountain rushes over the Colombian Pacific, lives a community of Afro-Colombians descended from slaves to the Spanish colonization, the so-called Maroons. In that narrow strip, and far from the world, they are dedicated to agriculture and fishing, building sailboats with the wood of a single log. Life has been hard at se. The storms made trips to sell bananas to the nearest city often turn into tragedies, as the elders still narrate.
There is not much left in those elders of the living memory of Africa. Perhaps a taste for oral literature and stories. An imaginary in which, in not so distant times, the spirits lived with humans and the magical realism that appeared in everyday life: strange lights in the sea called ‘rivieles’, gold or silver mists on ancient indigenous burials, accounts of encounters with mermaids, women flying or the mysteries that the inaccessible mountain of Janano contains, always covered with clouds.
But the Chocó has changed: the irruption of the guerrillas, drug traffickers and paramilitaries and their struggle with the army has greatly punished the once welcoming and peaceful population by altering social cohesion. In addition, the project for the construction of a large commercial port that Will transform radically the region and contaminate the waters, forever removing the whales and turning their inhabitants into a minority in their own land. This film aims to make a wake-up call and preserve the memory of its warm people. The documentary immerses us in the fantastic stories of that universe, before it succumbs, defeated by time.
