_{Mother Earth's Inner Organs by Ana Bravo Pérez}

The only mountains that Colombian director Ana Bravo Pérez ever saw in her adopted country of The Netherlands were the vast coal reserves she found in the ports of Amsterdam, Rotterdam and IJmuiden. When she discovered that this coal was (and continues to be) systematically extracted from a huge mine in the Wayuu territory of Colombia, an area she visited regularly as a student, she was shocked.

The coal creates much of the electricity that powers The Netherlands and its steel production, and is a resource which, of course, Bravo Pérez relies upon herself. But she also found out that the mine’s very existence has led to wholesale displacement of the indigenous folk within the Wayuu region. And with greater demand for coal from Europe following Russia’s invasion of Ukraine, the environmental and societal impact on the region is only set to intensify.

In the film, local stories and histories are invoked in the form of the titular Mother Earth's Inner Organs (or Mma) whose innards are rudely disgorged from the mine. The process releases spirits which invade the bodies of children and makes them sick, we are told. “I can see how the wound is opening and growing and its smell permeates everything that it finds in its way,” the narration describes.

Before the mine came the Wayuu people lived happily, sharing the land with iguanas and deer. Now they are kettled into a diminishing space, even forced to relocate their dead after the mine overtook their ancient cemetery.

The story that Bravo Pérez tells in her experimental work is therefore disturbing, and she deploys a corresponding visual language and sonic design. Black coal swirls and tumbles on the screen like carbonized pyroclastic flow. At one point a train goes by, the only train in Colombia we are told, but it goes by forever, each carriage laden with tons of coal. Likewise a cargo ship full of the black stuff traverses the frame for what seems an age. All the time accompanied by a harsh and convulsive transistorised soundtrack.

“The way I'm dealing with this topic is from a decolonial perspective,” Bravo-Pérez explains of her aesthetic choices. “And so I also need to use a language that it is not a traditional way of telling a story. It's not going from A to B or having these beautiful images - because the story I'm telling is not a beautiful story.”

“That's why in the beginning I knew that I really wanted to do something that is not following the canon of documentary making. I wanted to mix different kinds of images and textures because I also wanted to make the film more tactile and sensorial, so the people can feel it and not just receive information to the brain.”

The film was received very positively after its world premiere at IDFA, Bravo Pérez says. She is now submitting it to a raft of other festivals and is hopeful of broadcast deals that will deliver her vital and necessary work to wider international audiences.

“It's not just the Netherlands, but also other countries in Europe that are importing coal from Colombia, and now with the war in Ukraine it's going to be maybe more countries that are going to start importing coal from Colombia as well,” Bravo Pérez underlines of the film’s subject that has such dire ecological, economical and geo-political implications in a macro sense, but equally so in micro terms, given the cultural and psychological impact on the Wayuu people.
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