Gwynne Fulton : <\/strong>Your film contests dominant visual narratives of the Colombian conflict. Historically, access to the conflict was limited to embedded reporting, resulting in a view framed by the state, from the perspective of the military. Attentive to discourses in contemporary art concerning resistance and memorialization, your work offers another narrative that reflects on our responsibility to the dead and to a past that is never past but is written into the fabric of the world through song and ritual gesture. Violence has left its spectral traces in the land and, in particular, the waters of the Atrato River, which witnessed one of the worst massacres of the conflict.<\/p>\n\n\n\n I want to ask you about the connection between the water and the dead. For some time now, my research has circled around the question of water and its role as an archive of the dead. This resonates with ritual practices of the African diaspora. I am thinking specifically of the Haitian belief that the spirits of the Middle Passage haunt the oceans, even incurring their wrath in the form of destructive hurricanes; and Christina Sharpe\u2019s recent articulation of \u201cwake work\u201d as a critical and experimental practice that generates new ways of living in the afterlife of slavery.1<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 1 <\/a> - Christina Sharpe, In the Wake: On Blackness and Being<\/em> (Durham, NC: Duke University Press, 2016), 18. Nicholas Mirzoeff discusses the relationship between time, water, and resistance in \u201cBelow the Water: Black Lives Matter and Revolutionary Time,\u201d e-flux Journal<\/em> 79 (February 2017), accessible online<\/a>.<\/span> The figure of \u201cthe wake\u201d links the river\u2019s memory of the massacre to the forced transport of African communities across the Atlantic during Colombia\u2019s colonial era. Can you tell me about this connection between water, memory, and the lost souls that narrate the prelude to the film?<\/p>\n\n\n\n Juanita Onzaga : <\/strong> I perceive the world as four \u00adelements and a clash between them. This understanding comes from alchemy and shamanism, in which water represents so much; for example, our bellies as women hold water, and this water keeps the memory of what we have lived in this life, but also karmic memory from generations before us. In Colombia, for people in remote villages in the jungle, it is the river that connects them to the rest of the country and the world. You can travel to Bojay\u00e1 only by river, so everything comes and goes in this way. I wanted to explore how memory is held by water and how this river comes and takes everything\u200a\u2014\u200athe horrors, but also the beauty in life\u200a\u2014\u200aand sweeps it away. So I cannot trace one specific influence. It\u2019s a mix of the landscape there, Colombians\u2019 relationship with rivers, and my own personal view of the elements.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GF : <\/strong>These characters in your film\u200a\u2014\u200athe women and the group of children\u200a\u2014\u200alive in close contact with the dead. They call attention to a porosity of the boundaries between the living and the dead. They speak about the communal ritual called the novenario. Can you tell me about the work that this syncretic death ritual performs within the community?<\/p>\n\n\n\n JO : <\/strong> The novena ritual is performed after a death. It involves nine days of singing. All the village sings to the soul of the dead. This singing allows the soul to go in peace, so that the town is also left in peace. I researched this ritual and the specificities of the conflict in Bojay\u00e1, but also what was left after it. I explored the power of the ritual in allowing this community to continue and the resilience built\u200a\u2014\u200amainly by groups of women\u200a\u2014\u200athrough ritual. The women singing in the film (it is not only these women singing, but also their predecessors), expel air from their lungs, and the air that is this song goes searching for the spirits of the dead lost in the jungle. It gives a space to memory and to the dead in the midst of life. By being sung to, these spirits are able to keep going along the river to the afterlife. There are two main elements in the film: the water that brings us to the village from the memory of what has happened in this place; and the water that, by way of song, allows the spirits to go away.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GF : <\/strong>Your film has a clear geographic focus, but it also speaks to a conflict that resists localization. On the one hand, the armed conflict is transported by media images and in diasporic memory, such that it is lived elsewhere than where it is happening. On the other, the conflict is very geographically specific. It was waged primarily in the jungles and the mountains, territories which are disproportionately Afro-Colombian, Indigenous, and campesino, such that the conflict has always been striated by race and class. What drew you to Choc\u00f3 and to think about this specific geography of conflict?<\/p>\n\n\n\n JO :<\/strong> I can put this decision in the broader context of the country at that moment. It was October 2016. The peace agreement had been signed and the people had to vote to ratify it. The \u201cno\u201d vote won. I was in Brussels trying to understand what had happened. A good friend sent me an article about the Bojay\u00e1 massacre, which is in the memory of all Colombians as one of the places that lived through the worst of the conflict. The article explained that the Bojay\u00e1 region had the highest percentage of votes in favour of peace. Why had the majority of Colombians voted \u201cno\u201d to peace, and why had Bojay\u00e1 voted \u201cyes\u201d? Was there something in their culture that explained this? I had visited Choc\u00f3 two years prior, so I knew that these communities had a very different understanding of life. I began searching and discovered this ritual of singing, and it made sense that we needed this collective way to acknowledge our dead. It became visible that we were a country in grief, but that we were not assuming this responsibility. We were trying to ignore what was happening outside our city [Bogot\u00e1]\u200a\u2014\u200aeven outside our windows. I couldn\u2019t accept this. By making this film I wanted to explore how forgiveness is tied to how we handle our dead and our collective memory.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GF : <\/strong>Colombia has a rich literary tradition of magic realism. How has this influenced your work? How, also, does magic realism trouble assumptions about there being a firm line between the living and the dead?<\/p>\n\n\n\n JO : <\/strong> Magic realism is a concept that we are taught in high school, but it\u2019s also the way we have experienced reality all our life. Magic is never outside reality. Colombia is a violent and magical place; violence and magic coexist in the same plane of reality. If you believe in something, it is real. It is not because something is invisible that it is unreal. I grew up hearing stories about beings in the jungles and the plains\u200a\u2014\u200aand these stories are real. My work explores the linkages of this way of seeing reality with oral storytelling traditions that have been devalued in Western tradition. These stories tell us something about our larger reality. You define reality by saying what you think reality is, so cinema has the very real potential to define and create this future.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GF : <\/strong> So it is a kind of incantation\u200a\u2014\u200aa word that already has song, cantus, in it. The film mirrors the syncretic ritual of the novenario as a mode of testimony and ritual for a country that has foreclosed processes of collective mourning. Michel Foucault suggests that we should analyze power relations in terms of conflict, confrontation, and war. Inverting Carl von Clausewitz\u2019s proposition, Foucault argues that \u201cpolitics is the continuation of war by other means.\u201d2<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 2 <\/a> - Michel Foucault, \u201cSociety Must be Defended,\u201d Lectures at the Coll\u00e8ge de France 1975\u201376, trans. David Macey (Picador: New York, NY, 2003), 15.<\/span> I have seen Our Song referred to as a \u201cpostwar\u201d film. Is the conflict in Colombia over? Even though the peace agreement has been signed, NGOs and documentary filmmakers have issued reports about the state\u2019s weak institutional response to the escalation of targeted killing of human rights activists and land defenders, and about renewed clashes between the ELN, paramilitary groups, and state security forces that threaten Afro-descendent and Indigenous communities in Choc\u00f3 and elsewhere (in Cauca, for example).3<\/sup><\/a><\/span> 3 <\/a> - See Amnesty International, \u201cColombia: New Tragedy Looming in Bojay\u00e1 and Bajo Atrato,\u201d January 29, 2018, accessible online<\/a>; Gwynne Fulton and Alejandro Jaramillo, \u201cThey\u2019re Killing Us,\u201d Slought<\/em>, September 2018, accessible online<\/a>.<\/span><\/p>\n\n\n\n JO : <\/strong> The conflict is not over. The \u201cguerrilla\u201d was the figure of the enemy for fifty years, but the enemy is also the government, the paramilitaries, the new criminal organizations vying for control of the old guerrilla territories\u200a\u2014\u200athe enemy is narcotrafficking. As long as cocaine is being produced in this country, there will be conflict. But I build my work around sparks of hope. I chose to present Our Song this way because this is how I would like it to be. We have to fight for this possible future, for this view of what peace could be<\/em>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n GF : <\/strong> I want to ask you to speak a bit more about the inclusive \u201cOur\u201d in the film\u2019s title. Who does this include? What does the film ask of \u201cus,\u201d spectators of this war at a distance? I ask, in part, because the peace agreement was so contentious, with most of those living outside of the main conflict zones voting against ratification. Bojay\u00e1, on the other hand, as you mentioned, voted overwhelmingly in favour of peace.<\/p>\n\n\n\n JO : <\/strong> When I began reading about Bojay\u00e1\u2019s practice of dealing with the dead, I understood its weight in addressing a pervasive loss of empathy, such that if someone gets killed, that person is one more dead out there\u200a\u2014\u200afar away from Bogot\u00e1. But this conflict belongs to all of us: it displaced our grandparents; it caused our parents to work to too hard in a classist, machista society; it has made us leave our country. When I saw a whole community sing to one dead that was not specifically their own father or uncle, I understood that the only way to carry this inheritance, which continues to influence every choice we make, is to acknowledge that they are all our dead because they are dying in our territory. This community understands this, and that is why it was necessary to make this film.<\/p>\n\n\n\n But I also want to acknowledge that \u201cour dead\u201d are not just Colombia\u2019s dead, but the dead of all places where war has been or is still moving through. That is why there is little information in the film about the specifics of the massacre in Bojay\u00e1. It speaks more broadly to our relationship with death. One of the most beautiful things that has happened to this film is that it has been screened in countries around Syria\u200a\u2014\u200aLebanon, Turkey, Egypt\u200a\u2014\u200aand also in former Yugoslavian countries. Talking with people there, I realized that opening this particular song to a universal song is an invitation to everyone to give space to their dead, in their own way.<\/p>\n\n\n\n Traduit de l\u2019anglais par Margot Lacroix <\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n![\"Juanita](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/IM_Fulton_STILL2_300DPI_OSTW_CMYK-C.jpg\")
<\/strong>Our Song to War<\/em>, video still, 2018.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Juanita](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/IM_Fulton_Screen-shot_2017-11-24at23-40-37_CMYK.jpg\")
Our Song to War<\/em>, video still, 2018.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Juanita](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/IM_Fulton_Screenshot_2017-12-07_22-32-44_CMYK-C.jpg\")
Our Song to War<\/em>, video still, 2018.
Photo: courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n![\"Juanita](\"https:\/\/esse.ca\/wp-content\/uploads\/2025\/11\/IM_Fulton_still5_300dpi_ostw_CMYK-C.jpg\")
<\/strong>Our Song to War<\/em>, video still, 2018.
Photo : courtesy of the artist<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n