
La Bonga. 2023. Colombia. Directed by Sebastián Pinzón Silva, Canela Reyes. New York premiere. In Spanish; English subtitles. 77 min.
The village of La Bonga received a middle-of-the-night death threat in the midst of Colombia’s civil war, prompting the entirety of its Afro-Colombian community to flee for safety. Twenty years later, their mud-hut homes have vanished into the jungle. Sebastian Pinzón Silva and Canela Reyes’s accomplished debut feature accompanies these former inhabitants in their return journey, on foot, to a village that now only exists in their memory. Village matriarch Maria de los Santos leads the physical and spiritual journey, which culminates in a powerful testament to the importance of home, regardless of the crises that might befall it.