Cinema
Colombia linda
Camilo Correa · 1955
Synopsis
A series of musical and comic numbers held together by a light plot, performed by the stars whom radio had made popular. We move from one region to another, from one festival to another, from one tune to another: the country itself is the subject, and the story is there only to give the tableaux a thread.
Context
Produced by the company its author had founded in Medellín, and released the same year as another Colombian feature, shot in Cali and in colour. Both failed before an audience used to Mexican and Argentine films, and this double failure closed the decade: fiction production almost disappeared for three years. The sound was not synchronised, and the actors, who came from radio and the stage, were still working out what acting in front of a camera meant. The film continues the folkloric vein of the forties, and critics today reproach it for renewing a bucolic country that the cinema of the twenties already showed.
Who it is for
A musical fiction film of 1955, in Spanish. The narrative thread is thin: one goes for the musical numbers and for the regions filmed.
Prizes and reception
Its author's only fiction film, and one of the two films that closed the decade with a commercial failure.