The Barichara Green Film Festival, now in its 13th edition, features environmental stories as protagonists, calling for their attention and resources. In this edition, Juliana Paniagua makes her debut as festival director, after receiving this position from her mother Nórida Rodríguez.

In addition to its aim of showcasing environmental efforts, the festival also aims to highlight Barichara and the region where it is located as a tourist destination. The call for audiovisual projects to participate in this edition of the festival closed on June 30. Among the films in competition are “Blue Roots”, “Renjifo”, ​​“Sofia Will Return”, “The Land of Birds”, among others. The festival has 52 films in competition, from 18 countries, including Turkey, Tanzania, Haiti, Norway, Spain, the United Kingdom, Brazil, Argentina, Germany and Colombia. “During the call we received over 180 films, which was a surprise because this year we opened much later and the application deadline was shorter. This tells us the commitment of the filmmakers to be linked to the festival, because they were attentive and sent their works.

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“My challenge is to be able to do this edition with all that it entails and to be able to continue doing it, even if ⅔ of the organization is no longer with me,” Paniagua said, referring to Vega’s death, also his father figure for 10 years. The Barichara Green Film Festival takes place with the support of the Ministry of Information and Communications Technologies of Colombia – ICT.

This edition will pay tribute to Vega. On this subject, Nórida Rodríguez, current director of RTVC, assured that “Festive is a product of love… of love of nature, of cinema, of love between a couple, of love of a place, a region and a country. Even if the festival without Toto seems inconceivable to us, the idea of ​​not doing it is devastating. How can you not honor your work, your passion, your dream of moving forward? How can we not honor his last words? The Toto imprint lives on in everything that is Festiver, whose team will continue to work with the same passion and commitment.

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Guests include Spanish producer Loris Omedes; the director of BoliviaLab, Viviana Saavedra and the director of the Canadian environmental festival Planet in Focus, Katherine Bruce. New will be Diego Palomino, director and cultural manager, who accompanies us as part of an alliance between Festiver and the Ancash Film Festival (Peru). Regarding this year’s curatorship, Paniagua assured that: “We never assign an annual theme because since it is already an environmentally focused festival, we do not consider it necessary. We love to see how, every year, it is the same filmmakers who set the agenda, tackling the most relevant topics of each person’s context and showing the relationship between man and his environment.