History, violence and political activation: Antes del fuego as a cinematographic site of reconfiguration of the public sphere and collective memory in Colombia

Abstract

This article analyses Antes del fuego (Laura Mora, 2015) as a film that problematises the collective memory of conflict in Colombia through an articulation of film archive and fiction. The film revisits the siege and retaking of the Palace of Justice in Colombia in 1985, not to reconstruct the events, but to interrogate their political, aesthetic and historical meaning. The film’s narrative functions as a foreshadowing: set just days before the attack, it emphasises the imminence of the tragedy and exposes how violence seeps into everyday life. This analysis develops three theoretical concepts: the archive, understood as a site of symbolic dispute capable of resisting official versions of the past and activating a critical memory; pseudomorphosis, which explains the reconfiguration of genres, particularly the political thriller and the romantic drama—which, instead of offering narrative closure, produce a hermeneutic instability in keeping with the unresolved grief surrounding the event; and sensory realism, which articulates sound, camera and temporality to offer a perceptual experience where the body becomes an operator of historical knowledge. Mora proposes an ethics of the gaze that eschews the spectacularisation of the horror and prioritises traces, silences and signs. In this way, the film stands as a dispositif of aesthetic resistance, capable of challenging regimes of visibility of the past and contributing to processes of symbolic justice and collective memory.