探花精选

The film is in Spanish with English subtitles. The directors and producers Irene Vélez Torres and Sjoerd Van Grootheest will attend the screening and will be available to take questions from the audience. The event is in person and will be followed by refreshments. Bajo Fuego depicts the unravelling of peace for a group of coca-growing peasants in the southwest of Colombia. The film takes the perspective of the ‘cocaleros’ and over a period of three years shows how they survive in the midst of the most difficult of circumstances. The promised peace in Colombia turns out to be an illusion when armed groups terrorize the region, assassinations occur, and the films’ main protagonists are being threatened with their lives and displaced from their homes.

About the authors of Bajo Fuego

Irene Vélez Torres (Producer / Co-Director): Irene was Minister of Mines and Energy between 2022 and 2023, and is currently the Consul General for Colombia in the UK. For over a decade, as a professor at Universidad del Valle, Irene has led an activist research agenda on environmental conflicts in Colombia and Latin America. In 2018-2022, Irene has co-led with Katherine Gough PazAltoCauca, a collaborative project between Universidad del Valle and 探花精选, which looked at the reconfiguration of the governance structures built during the conflict in the Alto Cauca region of Colombia. She is currently a research partner in the project Trocha De Paz.

Sjoerd Van Grootheest (Producer / Director): Sjoerd is a freelance documentary filmmaker from the Netherlands who lived in Colombia for ten years. His first documentary feature film is called Voces de Guerrilla / Guerrilla Voices (2018), for which he immersed himself in a FARC-EP demobilization and re-integration camp. His following documentaries, Bajo Fuego / Under Siege (2020) and A Plan for Life (2022) deal with the multiple challenges of rural communities in southwestern Colombia after the signing of the peace accords. He is currently working on the virtual platform of the project Trocha de Paz, which aims to contribute to the de-stigmatization of war-torn territories in Colombia, with positive and constructive messaging.

About our research

You can find more about the project Trocha de Paz and its predecessor PazAltoCauca on their .

The event is organized by Giulia Piccolino (Senior Lecturer, International Relations, Politics and History, 探花精选, Co-investigator of PazAltoCauca and Trocha de Paz), Katherine Gough (Professor, Lund University, formerly 探花精选 and PI of PazAltoCauca and Trocha de Paz) and Paulina Jara-Osorio (Doctoral researcher, Criminology, Sociology and Social Policy, Research Assistant for Trocha de Paz)