Like Magic (Por arte de magia)
(Colombia/Argentina/Uruguay, 74 min.)
Dir. Melissa Saavedra Gil
Prod. Maritza Blanco Ruano, Agustina Chiarino, Lucía Alcaín, Melissa Saavedra Gil
Programme: TIFF Docs (World premiere)
In 1991, when Melissa Saavedra Gil was only three years old, her parents were murdered in their home in Calí, Colombia. Melissa miraculously survived the ordeal, but such scars never fully heal. As she reopens the case cinematically through Like Magic, she reflects upon how the brutality of the tragedy was compounded as the case was ultimately abandoned, as if police and the state didn’t think her parents’ lives merited investigation. Their daughter disagrees. Melissa evocatively confronts memories long buried and fragmented by trauma as a gesture to the consequences of violence both literal and bureaucratic.
Her return to the case hardly follows typical true crime fashion. In a sea of cookie-cutter hard-boiled docs, Like Magic asserts itself as a true original. The film defies the template for true crime analysis, instead favouring a hauntingly lyrical hybrid approach. A young girl narrates painful memories, while audio accounts offer witness testimonies, like the maid who discovered the bodies or the cop who arrived at the scene.
The images that Gil pairs with the audio, however, are downright unsettling and enigmatic. Masked figures roam through these haunted crime scenes. A young woman wearing a carnivalesque mask of a lipstick-smeared smoker with green hair and sunglasses serves as the story’s main seeker. Her somnambulist wanderings through the streets of Calí offer a surrogate for the filmmaker’s return to old haunts. She revisits places she’d long forgotten and been taught to shuffle from her memory. But these are fragments of a life created through the lens of a child who was forced to grow up fully aware of the consequences of violence.
The spectre of violence seems omnipresent in Like Magic. The wandering girl finds a counterpoint in the image of three joker-figures who parade through the streets like hooligans. The trio of men move through the city like a cloud of unrepentant terror. There’s no method to their madness. The voices in the film don’t try to rationalize the senseless violence that bumps up throughout the streets.
Other figures include a maid in a chicken mask and a cop disguised as a dog. These facades work twofold, offering anonymity to witnesses in the take-no-prisoners wake of cartel violence while also shrouding the tale in a surreal haze. Archival images punctuate the nightmarish imagery as old videos of family life in Calí assert the family into the tale. Gil refuses to let her parents be defined by body tracings or forensic reports. The pictures of ghosts add another layer of haunting voices to the story as the film develops an overwhelming sense of absence created by these years of loss.
Eventually, the young narrator grows up and a woman takes over the storytelling. Even as she ages, some memories sting especially hard, like the image of her mother slumped over a pile of cardboard boxes after taking a bullet execution style. Gil reimagines that pile of boxes. The Chicken Lady and the Dog Man observe it, equally helpless to restore some order to this world of chaos. Moreover, with every character appearing cloaked by a mask, the effect brilliantly invites witnesses to murder to participate in the investigation both artfully and anonymously.
Gil’s enigmatic feature debut refreshingly defies convention as she charts new terrain in autofiction and hybrid cinema. Her interrogation of memories and a life of trauma illustrate that sometimes the most elusive ways of approaching a story can also be the most direct ones. There’s no way to explain such a senseless act, and Gil isn’t looking to name the assassin, either. Identifying the killer or killers won’t bring her parents back. Instead, she painfully revisits the past to ensure that her parents’ memory survives. She can’t find justice, but Like Magic boldly refuses to be complicit with the culture of silence that surrounded the case—and continues to consume so many others.
