MEDIATHEK

A 1926 SOUTH AMERICAN FILM where Uncle Sam looks at the map of Colombia with lust before snatching Panama with its long golden claws.

Cinema-concert for two voices, soloists, amplified ensemble and electronics, from the poem Acuarimántima by Porfirio Barba Jacob and the first recitative of the cantata Was Gott tut, das ist wohlgetan I, BWV 98 by Johann Sebastian Bach, intended to one of the most remarkable films in the history of Colombian cinema, a cinematographic UFO long prohibited: Garras de Oro (1926). Mysteriously conceived by anonymous, scandalously - and briefly - projected, hurriedly removed by the censors all over LatinAmerica, then disappeared for more than forty years, this film has as a starting point the events that led to the independence of Panama against Colombia at the beginning of the XXth century.

Are we in front of a Colombian claim movie made after the independence of Panama? Or, is it a subtle artifact of American propaganda directed against Theodore Roosevelt? For this project, Juan Pablo Carreño has felt inevitable the artistic intervention of the Colombian filmmaker Luis Nieto within the original film, by reconstructing some scenes that fit in an original way at different moments of this anonymous cinematographic work. A cinema-concert performance by Le Balcon where instrumental music, narrative illustration, political manifesto and questioning about national identity intersect, complement and respond.

Garras de oro (Fiction Self-III) was premiered by Le Balcon at Church of St Eustache the 25th and 26th July 2013, during the festival Paris Quartier d’Été. In 2015, Le Balcon did a tour with this show in Colombia (Cartagena-Barranquilla-Bogotá), supported by the Institut Français, the Spedidam, the French delegation in Colombia, Colombian Republic Bank, International Cinema Festival of Cartagena, Proimágenes, the Film Patrimony of Colombia, among other institutions.