La Playa DC director Juan Andrés Arango returns to feature filmmaking with Where the River Begins, a heartfelt story about a young Emberá mother and her daughter who flee the violence in their Bogotá neighborhood and journey toward the Andágueda River, hoping to find their way back to the jungle home they once knew.
Blending Colombian roots with Canadian influences, director Juan Andrés Arango García introduced himself to the world with La Playa DC. The film debuted at Cannes in 2012 and went on to become Colombia’s official entry for the Best Foreign Language Film at the 86th Academy Awards.
Arango’s La Playa DC follows Tomas, an Afro-Colombian adolescent marginalized by systemic racism. When his brother and closest friend vanishes, Tomas’s odyssey through the city exposes both the harsh realities of exclusion and the resilience of self-discovery.
Juan Andrés Arango said“Where the River Begins” wants to explore the return that thousands of Colombians have gradually begun to make after the peace agreements with the paramilitary groups and the FARC allowed them to go back to the territories they were forced to abandon because of the war. This return is a complex and non-linear process, since the violence has mutated and continues to exist in many of these territories, and because the war has transformed these spaces, distancing them from the places of memory that their former inhabitants carry within themselves. This search for the spaces of our roots in a country transformed by war is my main motivation for telling this story. According to Variety.