Pacho, el archivo visual

dir. Blanca Marcela López

A couple of years ago, after my brother's death in 2013, I stumbled upon some undeveloped 35 mm film at my mother's home in Colombia. Once I developed the negatives, besides family pictures, birthdays, and first communions, I found a black and white series of photographs that Pacho had taken during a photography class, while he was doing his undergraduate studies in graphic design. The developed black and white negatives produced stills of Pacho with a group of friends taking pictures of themselves in a studio, and stills of architecture photos in the towns of San Gil, Barichara and Guane in the Province of Santarder, Colombia, towns very close to my home town and well known for its colonial homes and picturesque cobblestone roads. The documentary reenacts 11 of those stills, while we listen to his friends talk about their experience of friendship with Pacho during those university years. These interviews shed a new light on my brother as a friend, as a student, as the young man that I left behind when I left the country in 2005.