‘The End of Times’ Acquired by Split Screen Ahead of Venice Premiere

Zagreb-based sales outlet Split Screen has secured international rights to “The End of Times” ahead of its world premiere in Critics’ Week, an independent sidebar to the Venice Film Festival.

In Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas Maldonado’s film, Salomé searches through five decades of family footage for the reasons for her mother’s sadness. Trying to imagine different versions of her mother, Salomé finds out that all of them lead to depression and uneasiness in a context where it seems easier to conceive the end of the world than the end of capitalism.

By using Artificial Intelligence, she experiences in first person how difficult it is to conceive another version of the world, the one where her mother could find some kind of meaning.

The directors said, “Our age has glorified technological utopia, and the latest version of this promise is artificial intelligence. Yet, like earlier technological novelties, the shine of progress is discreetly stained by ambition, exploitation and misery.”

They added, “Seen from the perspective of peripheral countries condemned to the dark side of development and turned into an impoverished labor force, A.I. exposes its shadiest aspects.

“Our film seeks to show how the achievements of civilization are also triumphs of barbarism – a barbarism that is currently the rule under contemporary capitalism, or neoliberalism, a system of generalized physical and emotional exhaustion. In these conditions, depression has become the most common disease, not merely as a psychiatric phenomenon but as a social response to current material, economic and political realities.

“This project is an initiative to politicize mental illness. When it seems impossible to conceive a better world, sadness becomes the most usual form of adaptation.”

Marcella Jelic and Lorena Morin from Screen Split said, “Bibiana’s and Juan’s work caught our attention very quickly. It builds a remarkably complex narrative, using minimal resources for it. Not only in an original, but catchy and at times haunting way, they seamlessly connect an intimate family trauma with the broader colonial history of Latin America. It is a film which undeniably leaves one reflecting on the current state of us as a society.”

“The End of Times” is produced by Luis Esguerra Cifuentes (Bruma Cine, Colombia), co-produced by Bibiana Rojas Gómez (A Fuego Lento, Colombia) and Juan David Cárdenas Maldonado (Allegro Films, Colombia). Atomic Media Group served as the associate producer.