A family archive becomes a political excavation in The End of Times, the new Colombian feature by Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas. The 80-minute hybrid documentary, which combines archival footage, fiction, animation, and artificial intelligence, is set for its world premiere in competition at the 41st Venice Critics’ Week, the independent section of the Venice Film Festival, on September 9.The film is centred on Salomé, a faceless narrator searching through five decades of family recordings to understand her mother’s sadness. The footage comes from Cárdenas’ own extended family and from his grandparents’ house in Buga, a city in Colombia’s Valle del Cauca. The family gatherings recorded there become the film’s strange little time machine with recurring footage from a New Year’s party at the turn of the millennium, VHS home video footage from family get-togethers, and snippets of Colombia’s histories of political violence, economic liberalisation, drug trafficking and colonial exploitation.Salomé herself is fictional. Cárdenas’ family is real.“Salome, she doesn’t exist,” Cárdenas says. “She is a pure creation of fiction, but is inspired in part by some of my youngest cousins. A lot of those anecdotes in the narration are inspired by reality.”