How has Colombian cinema imagined collective life amid the aftermath and persistence of decades of armed conflict? This seminar proposes Cinema of National Reconstruction as a critical framework for understanding Colombian filmmaking of the past two decades. Rather than naming an established genre, the term identifies an evolving cinematic formation that responds to the unfinished work of reckoning with guerrilla warfare, paramilitary and state violence, forced displacement, narcotrafficking, and political corruption. Produced amid demobilization efforts, peace negotiations, the 2016 Peace Accords, and their contested aftermath, these films make cinema a vital space for confronting questions of memory, responsibility, trauma, justice, and coexistence that official institutions and state-led reconciliation initiatives have struggled to address.

Emerging within a broader Latin American affective turn (Podalsky), this cinema approaches the past from the perspective of a present that resists closure. Its embodied, fragmented, and counter-historiographic interpretations challenge totalizing narratives of conflict and reconciliation. Rather than merely documenting violence, these films participate in the cultural work of reconstruction by creating new ways of seeing, remembering, and imagining collective futures. They also ask who belongs to the nation, who has the authority to reconstruct it, and whether national unity can encompass the unequal and contested experiences produced by war.

Like Third Cinema, accented cinema, transnational cinema, intercultural cinema, and imperfect cinema, Cinema of National Reconstruction is proposed not as a fixed genre but as a critical category identifying shared ethical, aesthetic, and political concerns across diverse practices. These may reimagine conflict through haptic visuality, fragmented narration, contested landscapes, and challenges to stable distinctions among victims, perpetrators, witnesses, and bystanders. Grounded in Colombia yet attentive to societies marked by protracted conflict, the concept invites comparative reflection on cinema’s role in historical reckoning, social repair, political imagination, and the production—or disruption—of national belonging.

The seminar welcomes contributions on documentary, experimental, animated, hybrid, Indigenous, Afro-Colombian, diasporic, and community-based cinemas. We invite work on testimony, archives, transitional justice, collective memory, displacement, exile, migration, return, ecological violence, extractivism, and contested landscapes, as well as on how race, indigeneity, gender, class, marginality, and unequal citizenship shape conflict and its representation. Bringing together diverse visual methodologies, the seminar asks how film confronts persistent violence and inequality, envisions alternative forms of collective life, and contributes not only to reconciliation and reconstruction but also to dissent, refusal, and the reimagining of the nation.