09/05/1982

A deteriorated film, shot in 1982 in a Latin American country, presents a succession of everyday images, among which a few stand out that testify to the violent events that took place on May 9 of that year. Interspersed between the images, a man’s voice presents the official version of the events. Beneath its apparent banality, the film raises suspicion that what really happened was covered up.

Director’s note

Camilo Restrepo

In 2010, a chance discovery on the Internet revealed to me a collection of images filmed in an isolated region of Colombia: documents created to justify undertakings of domination in the service of economic, political and religious powers. That first short film laid the foundations for my subsequent work, all of it shaped by a concern with how images are used.

With 09/05/1982, together with Jorge Caballero, I wanted to question the role of computer tools in recomposing the past to fit revisionist discourses. Entirely generated with AI, the film is an example of what we call ‘synthetic footage’: the imitation of a damaged celluloid film, presented as a never-before-seen record of the tragic day of 9 May 1982. This fake archive helps us think about how new technologies have broken the link between images and facts: today the veracity of an image matters less than its ability to make us believe it reflects reality.

Jorge Caballero

My work as a filmmaker and researcher lives in the tension between the documentary and the speculative. 09/05/1982 emerges from the meeting of two seemingly opposing worlds: the physical, artisanal cinema of Camilo Restrepo and my own practice, tied to generative systems. We share one question: what happens when artificial intelligence is no longer used to represent the past, but to fabricate it?

If classical documentary reconstructed facts from evidence, 09/05/1982 operates from suspicion: it produces a false artifact capable of activating genuine reflection. The film proposes an exercise in critical imagination: questioning the visual certainties that shaped twentieth-century history and confronting a present where fiction, memory and propaganda blur with disturbing ease.

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