Yo vi tres luces negras

How to strive for peace whilst constantly watching out for death? In the Colombian village on the Pacific coast where 70-year-old José de los Santos lives, death is a constant companion. A place characterized by brutality and poverty, José finds himself surrounded by a literal and symbolic inferno. His son Pium Pium, who fell victim to an armed conflict, appears to José as a ghostly vision, demanding that his father leave his home and die elsewhere, in peace. José thus embarks on his final journey. Recalling the rituals passed down to him from his enslaved ancestors, the passage through the jungle and along the river becomes a portal to an ancestral realm. Thus, whilst being surrounded by violence, the search for peace becomes a process connected to individual, collective and spiritual memory; not forgiving and forgetting, but remembering and accepting. (ML)