El Rey

Colour, 35 mm
Colombia, France, Spain, 2004, 93 min
Section: Another View
Oficiální stránky: www.peliculaelrey.com

Synopsis

Columbia, 1966. The USA has promised to help with poverty, but they have mainly selected Columbia as a strategic location for stopping the Cuban Revolution. A bar owner and ambitious crook named Pedro Rey decides to take advantage of the gringos presence to change his name into a household word. Harry is an American Peace Corps volunteer who is smuggling Peruvian cocaine. He introduces Pedro to the drug trade and ‘El Rey’ comes up with the idea of processing cocaine in Columbia and he brings in a chemist to do just that. As business grows, El Rey learns the gamut of corruption and, blinded by his desire for power, he dreams of transforming the drug trade into the only “multinational company” that Columbia could pull off. Thus he writes the first chapter of drug trafficking history, setting it against the revolution?s disintegrating utopian theories: he is convinced that “the revolution is not made by poverty, but by money.”

About the director

Antonio Dorado graduated in journalism and literature, and he is a specialist in the area of audiovisual methods. Since 1990 he has been a professor of film and video arts at the Universidad del Valle. He has directed 28 documentaries, awarded, for example, at the IFF in Bogota and Cartagena. His documentary portrait Estanislao Zuleta, Biography of a Thinker (Estanislao Zuleta, Biografía de un pensador, 2000) was lauded as one of the 15 best Latin American audiovisual productions at the 2nd Encuentro Latinoamericano; in 2002 the same film won Best Documentary at the 20th Festival of Film and Video in Santa Fe, Argentina. His video Murmullos de agua took Best Documentary at the 2000 Encuentro Hispanoamericano del Milenio de Video Documental Independiente in San Jose, Costa Rica. El Rey (2004) is his feature film debut.