CAMILO RESTREPO

The story of how I started making films:
 
I have lived overseas for years. Back in Colombia for a month, I found out that my father was sick. He seemed fine to me, but he actually had something quite serious. He needed to take a series of tests to find out the exact cause.

But my father was more worried about a theft he had recently been the victim of than he was about his illness.

My father owned a large warehouse, which he rented to businesses. When the most recent tenants left, they took the electrical wiring, sockets and lamps with them, leaving empty tubes inside the walls. My father was going to have to have the whole circuit replaced.
 
He wanted proof of the theft, as he hoped to sue his former tenants. So he asked me to film the spots where missing lamps and sockets should have been, the holes through which the wiring had been pulled out, and more.

Of course, the images didn’t prove anything: the warehouse looked exactly like it did when he rented it.
 
Every morning, I would go to the warehouse with him, and every afternoon, to the hospital. Day after day, we would go from construction work to medical tests, from my images to his scans.

We were the only ones who could interpret the images we were producing, just as the doctors were the only ones for the scans. But that resonance was exactly what granted meaning to the images I took.

That is how I became interested in the fate of images. That is how I started making films.


Camilo Restrepo (1975, Medellín, Colombia). Since 1999 lives and works in Paris, France. He is a member of L’Abominable, laboratory of artist working on film stock. His short films IMPRESSIONS OF A WAR (2015) and CILAOS (2016) premiered at Locarno and both won the Pardino d’Argento.

www.camilo-restrepo-films.net
www.l-abominable.org