La tierra y la sombra: cine háptico, violencia ambiental y desplazamiento forzado en Colombia

Abstract

The film Land and Shade (2015) by César Acevedo (Colombia, 1984) tells the story of a family that refuses to leave a territory from which all the other peasants have been displaced due to the imposition of the sugar cane monoculture in Valle del Cauca. The main question of this paper is what are the causes and consequences of forced displacement that the film presents and what do they have to do with ecological territories? I argue that through haptic film techniques (Marks 2000), which use vision as a sense of touch, the film makes viewers experience some of effects of the environmental violence that Rob Nixon (2011) calls slow violence. I argue the film not only explores the peasant migration from one rural space to another, but also deals with the movement of political borders on ecological territories caused by the extractivism of the sugar cane monoculture. I claim that slow violence is also exercised against non-human beings and ecosystems and I explore how the film exposes different types of precariousness and turns the viewer into a witness of this type of political violence.