23/03/2018

Tropical Virus, the new film made by Uniandes alumni

The poster for Tropical Virus, the graphic novel on which the film made by the Uniandes alumni is based.
Tropical Virus will be premiered in Colombia after having been shown at international film festivals.
In 2018, after a five-year creative process, the animated feature film Tropical Virus was ready. It was inspired by a graphic novel of the same name by the Colombo-Ecuadorian illustrator Paola Gaviria –known as 'Powerpaola'– and the book tells her personal story as well as the relationship she has with her family, sex, drugs, and marriage.

“It is a simple story that helps you understand the importance of being loyal to yourself”, says the director Santiago Caicedo.

Caicedo, a personal friend of the artist, decided to make this film together with his wife Adriana García, who is also an art graduate from Uniandes. It turned into a professional challenge for them and their producer Timbo. Being their first feature film, their goal was to make the most quality product they could despite their scarce budget. They worked with a key team of six artists and more than one-hundred other people throughout the process. The film has just been shown in four international cinema festivals and the hope is that it is shown in cinemas throughout Colombia in the second half of this year.

“Every film is an experimentation process” says Adriana García, who is not a professional musician but composed the original soundtrack. For her, perhaps the most important lesson she learnt from this production was to not fear trying.

“We do not need to define what we do because there are always intermediate places, and, when it comes to creating, it is better for something to exist than not to exist. We made the film with this in mind -modestly- but it is inspired by a very human history that gave us the possibility to experiment. We are now going to see if the result is good or bad”, she said with the aim of inspiring artists-in-training.

Both Adriana and her husband are professors at Los Andes. She teaches classes on Movement Composition and Sound and Action, and he teaches an Animation class.

Tropical Virus had its world premiere last year at the official competition of the first ever Animation is Film Festival in Los Angeles. It is now being shown in Berlinale, as the Berlin International Film Festival is known, and in the International Cinema Festival in Cartagena de Indias (FICCI).

The film will be shown as part of the Global Selection at the South West Film Festival in Austin, Texas, which brings together the latest trends in cinema, music and related arts. Lastly, it will be shown in the Buenos Aires International Festival of Independent Cinema (BAFICI).

For more information, consult the Faculty of Arts and Humanities.

Tropical Virus will be shown in cinemas throughout Colombia in the second half of the year.

For more information on Tropical Virus as well as news about arts and humanities click HERE

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