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‘Five Years, Four Months’ Review: Moving Portrait of a Grieving Colombian Mother Demonstrates an Impressive Control of Tension
- Colombian film follows a mother searching for her disappeared son, based on real accounts from victims' families caught in the country's decades-long internal conflicts
- Directors use restrained realist techniques interwoven with haunting dream sequences to portray how grief and trauma intensify rather than fade
- Premiered at Karlovy Vary festival; praised for artistic command of tension through sound design, framing, and pacing that conveys psychological isolation
Thousands of people in Colombia have been “forcibly disappeared”, as the euphemistic expression goes, since conflicts began in the mid-1960s between the Colombian government and various paramilitary and guerilla groups. This reality is well-known, and has been so for a while — an awareness that, over such a…
