When director Juan Miguel Gelacio first began listening to the stories of mothers searching for their disappeared sons in Colombia, he thought it would make an interesting documentary. Then, he believed their accounts would lend themselves beautifully to a short fiction film. As the project evolved, Gelacio onboarded his “Jungle” co-director Esteban Hoyos García, who told his friend that the woeful tales of these women needed to be told through a feature film. The result is “Five Years, Four Months,” the first Colombian film to play in the Crystal Globe Competition at the Karlovy Vary Film Festival.
The moving drama follows Martha (Jenny Nava), a mother whose son has been lost amidst the Colombian armed conflict. Five years into her desperate search, the mother receives news that no bone match was found in the last exhumation she was a part of. Having exhausted all institutional options, she then travels with Sandra (Carmiña Martinez), a fellow searching mother, towards a village where the dead are rumored to grant the living one favor.
Speaking with Variety ahead of the film’s world premiere at the renowned Czech festival, Hoyos García says the idea for the film came from a real-life story of a river that kept bringing bodies to the shores of a small Colombian town. Unable to find the bodies of their own sons, searching mothers would then “adopt” the dead, helping them be buried and then visiting their graves at the local cemetery.
