The Labyrinth

A journey into the labyrinthine memories of a Uitoto man who worked for drug lords in the 1980s Colombian Amazon. Moving between a rainforest and a narco mansion inspired by the American soap opera Dynasty, the film unfolds a hallucinatory near-death account.

Laura Huertas Millán: 'I met Cristóbal Gómez Abel, the narrator, in 2011 while doing research in the Colombian Amazon around drug trafficking and architecture. We've developed a dialogue around different uses of the coca plant, grounded in his experience as a former drug worker and his belonging to the Muina Murui community, where the plant is sacred and worshipped in an opposite way from the "narcos" ideologies and uses. In the Muina Murui community, memory is transmitted through oral tradition, and elder persons are honoured as memory and knowledge gatekeepers. Cristóbal, who is around seventy years old, is indeed an educator. He is a father, a grandfather, a great-grandfather — in his community, abuelo refers not only to literal kinship but also to social kinship. Abuelos and abuelas are the grandfathers and grandmothers of the community, the protectors, the mentors.

Cristóbal is also a witness. He lived [through] the cocaine boom in the Amazon in the 1990s. He also inherited the trauma of the Amazonian rubber plantation genocide (the Casa Arana crimes) from the previous generation.

The stories Cristóbal tells in The Labyrinth are all first-hand experiences. The film was built around one sound recording I made in 2012, one year after our first meeting. That shooting was a strong moment, materialising hours of discussion in other contexts. It was the first line of the film to come, from which everything unfolded.’

— Excerpted from 'Laura Huertas Millán "The Labyrinth" ', introduced by Eileen Myles