CINETORO positions itself as a transdisciplinary Festival-School, devoted to curatorial practice and the training of filmmakers. It builds bridges between emerging talents and renowned national and international artists, while fostering analysis and critical thought around the production and ideas that shape experimental cinema and animation.
We advocate for a cinema where poetry and the visual arts converge; a cinema that pushes its boundaries beyond spectacle, technical correctness, or the thematic and formal trends of the moment. It is an imperfect cinema, one that embraces its artisanal nature and is concerned with reclaiming awareness of corporeality, while reflecting on, questioning, and problematizing the construction of image and sound.
A cinema with territorial imprint, constantly redesigning, mutating, and speaking to the world. It re-signifies territory, transforms the gaze upon rurality, and creates spaces where communities can reclaim knowledge.
Here, we see differently!
A NEW PERSPECTIVE… To go, to go beyond what is established. To break the mold. To step outside the line. To create. To draw from the everyday experience, sensations, flavors, sounds — and create from your own story, your own voice. From lives distant from your own. From hidden voices. The experience of experimentation: possibility, disruption, narratives, and aesthetics.
CINETORO is an initiative to decentralize the arts through the circulation of experimental cinema. It is the result of a historical connection between photography and cinema in the community of Toro, dating back to 1936.
Since 2008, we have served as a reference point for experimentation in Colombia, from the vantage point of experimental animation, cinema conceived through the arts.
Our actions stand in opposition to the sociopolitical interests and the violence that have marked the northern Valle del Cauca since the 1990s, building through cinema an artistic critique that seeks to transform the idiosyncrasies of narcoculture.
We offer an alternative to the cultural programming available across the 16 municipalities of the northern subregion of the department, and especially for the 17,500 inhabitants of our town, mostly rural farmers.
Our mission is to disrupt the gaze of younger generations. Our content acts as a counterweight to the hegemonic Hollywood model, appealing to audience development by embracing national experimental production from an inclusive perspective inter-, pluri-, multicultural. The aim is to bring audiences closer to new identities through resilience, belonging, and care for the territory and its communities.
The program calls forth contemporary thought: aesthetics, philosophy, geopolitics, technology, the environment, among other themes, as well as the narratives that shape our world. It establishes connections that help us understand the processes of Colombian rurality in dialogue with the global sphere.