Abstract/Summary

Colombian filmmaker Juan Soto has been read within recent scholarship as forming part of a significant new generation of filmmakers producing experimental works that counter dominant (extractive) representations of the country’s armed conflict. Soto’s experimental engagement with memory and his family’s own relationship to political violence are clearly on display in his 2017 film Parábola del retorno (Parable of the Return), which explores the exile and disappearance of the director’s uncle, Wilson Mario. This article contends, however, that the film’s critical engagement with the audiovisual archive should also be situated within a recent turn in Colombian cultural production in which modes of spectrality and haunting have sought to bring to the present the silences of Colombia’s history of violence in the context of recent peacebuilding and transitional justice processes. Analysing how Soto’s film cinematographically enacts ideas of hauntology, the article shows that Soto deploys the modes of spectrality not to reinforce dominant discourses of historical memory, or work through a violent past. Instead it argues that Soto dialogues with recent scholarly work on spectrality that emphasises the emancipatory potential of the ghost as a means of critiquing official discourses of ‘post-conflict’ and teleological ideas of ‘transition’ in Colombia.