Cinema
La tragedia del silencio
Arturo Acevedo Vallarino · 1924
Synopsis
A melodrama centred on a man afflicted with leprosy. He is an engineer, he is married, and he keeps silent. The illness comes, he hides it from the woman who shares his life, and the country around him shuts its lepers away in closed villages from which no one returns.
Context
Presented on 18 July 1924 at the Faenza theatre in Bogotá, which had opened four months earlier, with a score by Alberto Urdaneta Forero played during the screening: it was the first time a Colombian film had received one. Well received by critics and audiences, it was then shown in Panama and Venezuela. Its subject led to its being attacked by those who judged that associating the country's name with this disease harmed it, and the same alarm was raised the following year over another film. Twenty-two minutes and forty-five seconds of it survive.
Who it is for
A silent fragment of twenty-two minutes, with Spanish intertitles. What remains no longer follows the story: one watches faces and a city in 1924.
Prizes and reception
The first Colombian film accompanied by an original score. The surviving fragment is published in the collection of Colombian silent cinema.