'Five Years, Four Months' Review: A Colombian Mother's Grief
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- "Five Years, Four Months" is reviewed as a moving portrait of a grieving Colombian mother, with the review highlighting the film's impressive control of tension
- Colombia's armed conflict, which began in the mid-1960s between the Colombian government and various paramilitary and guerrilla groups, has resulted in thousands of forced disappearances
- The review frames forced disappearance as a "euphemistic expression" for a well-known and long-recognized reality in Colombia
Why it matters: The film and its review bring renewed attention to Colombia's thousands of forced disappearances — a decades-long crisis tied to conflict between the government and paramilitary and guerrilla groups since the mid-1960s — by centering a single mother's grief as a lens onto that larger, ongoing reality.
