Six months have passed since he won the brand new Golden Shell at the San Sebastián festival for The Kings of the World and the Colombian Laura Mora (Medellín, 1981) still remembers that moment with goosebumps. "I could never have imagined that we were going to win the prize. The presentation of the film was so special... people were excited and there was a very beautiful energy around us", comments the director about her second feature film, a road movie that narrates the dangerous journey, from Medellín to Nechí (Antioquia), undertaken by five adolescent friends who are alone in the world in search of the promised land. The Kings of the World pre-opened last Tuesday the LATcinema Fest, the Latin American film festival of Casa Amèrica Catalunya, and it opens this Friday in theaters throughout Spain.
After the success in San Sebastián and its appearance at festivals such as Zurich and Biarritz, how has the reception of the film been in Colombia?
Incredible. Obviously the prize helped a lot. We landed in movie theaters 18 days after San Sebastián and there was a lot of hype about the film and that made a lot of people go to movie theaters and that Colombians don't usually go much. They were very overwhelming days because I'm not used to it. Everything was new and I really wanted to protect the boys from all this media stuff, which is very strong.
After an autobiographical film like 'Killing Jesus', which reflects on the violence in your country, what led you to write the story of 'The Kings of the World'?
She comes very fed from the casting of Matar a Jesús because since they were also non-professional actors I did a very big casting for the character of Jesus as well as the little characters that were located around him and I met fascinating guys. As a woman I am very intrigued by the world of men, especially in such a violent society where I feel that violence is such a masculine heritage. And I was really impressed that during the Kill Jesus interviews all the guys said that their biggest wish was to have a place in the world. And, on the other hand, I had the idea of making a film about the land, which I feel is the neuralgic point of the conflict in Colombia. When I finished shooting Killing Jesus, I made the same trip that the boys do, a trip that I have done a thousand times between Medellín, north of Antioquia, Bajo Cauca to go out to sea and I thought that those roads were very cinematographic. There was so much tension in that landscape and so much beauty. During that trip in 2016 I began to have images of boys doing evil and it was so strong that I stopped the car and wrote down three phrases in my notebook: boys who claim the world; Guys take revenge on the world and we are the kings of the world. I went to the sea and began to write very freely and I realized that it was a film that was going to transition all the time between a surreal king and a more symbolic register.
Is there anything from the lives of those boys in the film?
It's not his life and it's not based on any particular biography or anything I've been told. For me, the land restitution thing became an excuse. It's like I started to write these images of the kids and you see what happens if one day they don't have anything and suddenly you receive a letter from the State that names you, that tells you that they are going to return you to the origin, to which a day they took away your family.
Is there any news on the issue of the land conflict in Colombia? Has there been any progress?
Yes, it's crazy that the film coincides with the election of the first progressive government in history, which has put land restitution at the center of the discussion. It has been perhaps one of the hottest issues in the peace process and it is like a thorny key that nobody wants to touch. And suddenly the government does. It has been very interesting. In fact, the land restitution unit office purchased a private showing of the film for officials to view in December. I talked to them and I thought they were going to be reticent because there is explicit criticism in the film of those Kafkaesque, bureaucratic processes and it was super nice how they received it. They told me that a few years ago there was the first land restitution to minors. And, on the other hand, it seemed very hopeful to me because so far this government has already signed a lot of restitution acts, which means that there are people who are going to return a piece of land and that is a historical debt in Colombia. The film has coincided with a very interesting moment.
How did you find your young protagonists?
Some of them I already knew from Killing Jesus. Although I opened the casting and we saw more guys. For example, Davidson, who plays Sere, the boy with a disabled arm, is as mystical as his character. He is ready to die as a martyr. He is very shy and wonderful. During the writing I talked a lot with the guys who do gravity bikes and then Karel Solei, the casting director of both films, came in, to whom I described what the characters were like and we described a questionnaire for each of them. And these five guys showed up. But when we had the group ready, the guy who played Ra quit three weeks before the shoot. I almost died. I begged him but there was no way. Ra means Sun in Arabic and Karel decided to leave the city and open the casting to nearby municipalities because in Medellín we had already seen everything. In the north of Antioquia he saw some boys on bikes. One of them is searched by the police and when they let go she approaches him and sends me a photo. I was surprised because it was very Mediterranean and she wrote to me saying: "Ra appeared, the Sun appeared." The truth is that he was very different from the other boy. She actually had me rewrite certain things because this boy was much cuter.
Do you keep in touch with them?
Yes, we have formed a family. They have built a very beautiful friendship. Everything in the city was the last thing we shot and we already arrived with a very consolidated group. We also started shooting all the gameplay scenes and they found it a lot of fun.
I would like to highlight that tender sequence in which these older sex workers dance with their arms around each other. The women here play a very maternal role...
I am also very excited about that sequence because it existed in a very detailed way in my imagination. For me that brothel is Colombia. We are going to enter a motherland and, like in Colombia, we are going to see women who may be reunited with their children lost in the war. The role of women in Colombia has been very strong because they have been the ones who have survived, while men have been the victims in terms of deaths. The brothel is full of altered national symbols and we really enjoyed building that universe.
In addition to the portrayal of that violence that the boys go through, the film contains many poetic and hypnotic elements. What was his intention?
I wanted the film to break the genre a bit. There are some characters that from minute one are being expelled and the only territory from which they could not be expelled is the oneiric, the symbolic, that of the imagination. It is a free, intimate place and I was interested in building that limbo between reality and delusion. The land, the homeland or the motherland whatever you are looking for exists in the symbol.
What does justice mean to you?
I think my work is crossed by an obsession with justice, perhaps because I have lived in a tremendously unfair country. I am the daughter of a murdered father for whom I will surely never have an answer from justice. I am concerned about justice from the State and chance because the place where we are born ends up determining our existence. In Colombia, it depends where you were born, that dictates your destiny a bit. I see justice as a kind of utopia and that is why I am interested in inquiring about it in the cinema. It seems to me that it surpasses us human beings. Today it is something very unattainable. I would like to think that it should be the ultimate goal of our relations.
