Mompox, Cine y Memoria (Mompox, Cinema and Memory)

Mompox, a historic city on the banks of the Magdalena River, was the location chosen by Italian filmmaker Francesco Rosi to film his 1986 adaptation of Gabriel García Márquez's novel Chronicle of a Death Foretold. García Márquez based the novel on real events. In his writing, he sought to explore a community's responsibility in the face of the death of an innocent person. These themes caught Rosi's interest, as he had explored issues of power and injustice in previous films in Italy and Spain. Drawing on personal memories and the relationship between Mediterranean and Caribbean culture, this documentary essay explores the locations used in the film and where the film crew was based. It also explores the memories of filming among the city's inhabitants and examines the relationship between the events described in the novel and the reality of Mompox, creating a dialogue between past and present, and between life and art.

This documentary essay is part of a larger research and artistic project that explores different approaches to film history (oral history versus archival sources), memory and identity, and the relationships between the Caribbean and the Mediterranean.