Jirapo
María Rojas Arias / Colombia & Portugal / 2025 / European Premiere / 20 min
A beautiful Colombian film that draws parallels between native bee species, the country's colonial past, and a female biologist's family history.
The images feel as organic as the world that Colombian artist María Rojas Arias captures with her analog film camera in her beautiful and suggestive film ‘Jirapo’. A film that draws original connections between a woman’s studies of a species of native bees that have existed in tropical areas since before the European invasion of America, to the country’s colonial past. During one of her excursions, she discovers several of these nests in the cemetery where her ancestors are buried, raising questions about the relationship between human death, the body, violence, and resistance.