In this statement I want to explain why I am an instrument of society, which leaves through me a subjective but sincere testimony of herself. While making a film is a combined manifestation of the dreams and the mysteries of a filmmaker, I do not justify the idea that the artist makes a movie "for the sake of" doing so. More than this, a film is the truth as conceived by the creator in images not necessarily realistic, but enough to express the sadness and hope, beauty and misery, hatred and love he perceives in its environment. I feel the need to tell this story as a document of both  societies in which I grew up (Colombia) and I live (Berlin), as if I would take a dictation from these two collective consciences to my creative ability and imagination.

The focus of my interest, which is the dramatic arc of the story, is the transition that a human group is always undergoing between the state of community and society, as devised by the German sociologist Ferdinand Toennies, who defines a 'community' as the type of relation in which natural will dominates, and a society as a kind of collective formed and conditioned by rational will. Toennies wrote: "community is the common life; lasting and authentic. Society is only an apparent and temporary common life. Therefore, the community must be understood as a living organism, and the society as an artifact and mechanical aggregate. "

The relationship between Leo and Sofia, a man in his mid-life crisis and a girl coming-of-age, symbolizes the painful and incomplete process that the contemporary Colombian society is living: where four presidential candidates were killed in the same year the world saw the Berlin wall fall.

This process has undergone three stages:

The first, chaotic, in which the lack of decisions to tackle the necessary changes, left the society unable to react.

In the second, the society decided that it was time for dialogue, to reach "agreements", under the idea that a bad deal is better than a good fight.

The third scenario imposes a strong mandate to bring order to the institutional chaos.

Only history will tell if after eight years under a corrupt, abusive and authoritarian government, the current one will cause the Colombian society to live a fourth scenario in the near future, in which the society, by respecting differences, will begin to be a community, through an effort to abandon old ways of being, and to undertake profound changes needed in the individual and collective mindset. This is what Leo and Sofia live at the end of the story. Superficially it may seem to be a happy ending, actually it is a painful start for the both of them.

This transition from society to community, difficult in itself, becomes even more complex when emotions and problems of people come into play: human beings confronted with their past, their idea of belonging to a family, a race, nation or culture, their beliefs about God, love and tragedy, good and evil.

To me it is very important to treat the characters and actions as themes. They are means to recreate conditions of our time such as consumerism, radical sexual practices, pornography, fear, lack of privacy, ubiquity and immediacy, mass tourism and the neurosis of success, which are, in a misguided way, answers to our huge contemporary questions: How to be authentic in a world increasingly individualized, how to build roots and find individual space in a world inevitably global, how to ratify the right of self determination in a society that restricts civil liberties for the sake of our own security, how to build a healthy society where families seem to be increasingly sick, how to have a historical perspective while the world is becoming more immediate, or how to be ethical when for the most successful men in society the end justifies the means?

Those are the dilemmas in which live Nadia, Julieta, Ursula, Hannes, Marika and the other characters whom join Leo and Sofia in Berlin.

To dramatize these conflicts, I need an environment that is constantly enraged, but "likeable" in itself, where the disturbances are not vain or distort the feelings and perceptions of the characters. I can not think of a better place than Berlin, where there are no lost suburbs in which you walk down the street without finding something to do or something that is seemingly "out of place."

Despite her silence and parsimony, Berlin is alive 24 hours, in a permanent move, but very different from brutal and ruthless cities like Bogota, New York or London.
In Berlin, Babel where you can breathe the thrill of destruction, nothing disappears irrevocable destroyed, things live on as an object of one of the thousands of antique dealers and flea markets, where history becomes a retail product. It is an environment where rules and objects can rather be destroyed by fashion, time or seduction, than by violence or the breakdown of social structures.
Berlin, with its abundant supply of services "without cost" but not for "free", is not miserable, even if life is difficult. There it seems that you can live life as you should, and this is what attracts millions of tourists annually.

The story will have a keen sense of observation on Berlin life, the traffic on the streets, the solidary egocentrism and sporty hedonism of its people, the local urbanism and the anarchy, likeable and destructive at the same time, of the marginalized Berliners, who permanently attempt to attack the peaceful lifestyle of the bourgeoisie, yet the bourgeoisie itself fancies marginalization from time to time: because marginality also has its romantic "cool" side.

Victor Hugo Gutiérrez Giraldo

Berlin, December 2011