Abstract: This article explores aging masculinity in two Colombian films: Rubén Mendoza’s Tierra en la lengua (Dust on the Tongue, 2014) and Henry Rincón’s La ciudad de las fieras (The City of Wild Beasts, 2021). It analyzes the common threads of aging, illness, masculinity, and the difficulty of passing on traditions to argue that the films depict grandfatherhood in a way that reexamines and ultimately reinforces certain patriarchal attributes, such as strength and resilience, albeit in new guises. I examine how the landscape, which plays a prominent role in both films, is represented in a way that complicates the idea of masculinity in the context of social violence. This study contributes to the understanding of how Colombian cinema navigates and portrays male roles amid the enduring impact of social and political violence.

Since the 2010s, following the expansion of film production after years of economic crisis and internal conflict, Colombian cinema has focused on characters and locations that resignify the social position of aging men. A characteristic of these men is that they have been hit hard by the neoliberal policies that led to the dismantling of regional economies, social security, and particularly the health system. This dismantling mostly unfolded in the first two decades of the twenty-first century, when armed insurgency, paramilitary groups, and state terrorism—all linked to drug trafficking—had devastated both urban and rural areas, forcing millions to leave their communities. There is increased cultural interest in how various social groups have handled the rampant crisis of care that these various forms of violence have fostered. In this context, cinematic representations of growing old have become a space for male redemption. Several directors suggest that older men can rebuild family ties by caring for others, thus reshaping traditional masculine traits. Feature films such as Ciro Guerra’s Los viajes del viento (The Wind Journeys, 2009), Rubén Mendoza’s Tierra en la lengua (Dust on the Tongue, 2014), César Augusto Acevedo’s La tierra y la sombra (Land and Shade, 2015), Rafael Martínez Moreno’s El Piedra (The Missed Round, 2018), and Henry Rincón’s La ciudad de las fieras (The City of Wild Beasts, 2021) reposition older men in a society that values the work they have done to support and protect future generations, thus lifting them out of a place of weakness. Furthermore, these films highlight male characters who become more self-aware by recognizing their mistakes and realizing how they have wronged the young protagonists.

This article analyzes male aging as reflected in Mendoza’s Tierra en la lengua and Rincón’s La ciudad de las fieras. At a time when cities such as Bogotá and Medellín are emblematic of individualism, inequality, and youth violence, the figure of the grandfather presents new cinematic forms of recognition and redemption for men living in the Colombian countryside. Portraying grandfathers who feel haunted by their past actions, rooted predominantly in the patriarchal authority associated with family quarrels, infidelity, and chauvinism, allows the films’ directors to critically explore traditional gender constructions that stage violent competition between men. Within this tradition, films such as Víctor Gaviria’s La mujer del animal (The Animal’s Wife, 2016) and Carlos Carrera’s El traspatio (Backyard, 2009) stand out for their deconstruction of perceptions of gendered violence. Sayak Valencia and Sonia Herrera Sánchez have shown that these films center not only on the sexist use of force but also on the production and circulation of images that reaffirm certain stereotypes of gender, race, and class.[1] In fact, both films explore patriarchal brutality not merely as an individual occurrence but, specifically, as a social problem. Departing from these representations of extremely toxic masculinity associated with battery, kidnapping, rape, and femicide, Tierra en la lengua and La ciudad de las fieras distance men from physical force. The debility, decrepitude, and exhaustion that characterize their old age produce a kind of fragile masculinity such that the protagonists mourn their conventional manhood, which problematizes their positions as cisgender men due to their inability to work. Nevertheless, the depictions of these aging men show that patriarchal authority relies not only on force to express power but also on pain, disability, and death.

Art Redding has examined the increasing number of “narratives of patriarchal renewal” in the English-speaking world.[2] He explains that representations of male aging throughout the twenty-first century eschew realism in favor of imaginative explorations of masculinity and present “an endorsement of male weakness as power.”[3] Although Redding’s focus is the American Western, connecting his analysis to Colombian film productions is relevant considering that representations of aging men arise in the United States as a response to the increase in male violence. If in the American context “the physical limitations that age places on violent performances or male competition” inspired directors like Clint Eastwood to “mask” those same limitations with a character who would eventually redeem his own weakened power through force and violence, as Redding explains, Tierra en la lengua and La ciudad de las fieras directors Mendoza and Rincón would also mask male power to redeem their own grandfathers but, in their cases, by appealing to illness and physical fragility.[4]

Following Redding’s analysis, this article uses the concept of “patriarchal renewal” to argue that Tierra en la lengua and La ciudad de las fieras demonstrate the power of male weakness.[5] Tierra en la lengua shows its protagonist’s flaws but elicits sympathy from viewers due to his aging and imminent death. La ciudad de las fieras allows the grandfather to atone for past wrongs, including having abandoned his grandson, by accepting blame in old age. Specifically, redeeming masculinity in today’s Colombia translates into feature films that explore the lives of older men beyond the male archetype defined by physical strength. Thus, with these characters, the films build repertoires that speak of moral strength instead, which reaffirms the role of the patriarch when he is given a second chance. The representation of old age in both films develops in a rural space: the countryside is a cinematic space where masculinity gives the grandfather a certain dignity tied to a patriarchal vision of the hardworking man who is, above all, responsible for the care of his offspring and grandchildren.

The attributes of old age are not imagined in a vacuum. Instead, they are part of cultural traditions that invariably conceive of them in relation to the characteristics valued in other stages of life.[6] These beliefs usually regard old age as a culminating moment that, in contemporary capitalist societies, is associated more with decrepitude and disability than fullness. Sally Chivers, in her book on representations of old age in Hollywood/US mainstream cinema, notes the following: “Perhaps it is obvious that aging affects all of us. Each of us grows older every minute and, in the best-case scenario, each of us will become old, eventually. . . . But because age is always relative, we can almost always find someone further along the age continuum to comfort us about our comparative youth. Further, we all live in relation to our current age and other people’s interpretation of it.”[7] Interestingly, the continuum that Chivers refers to is broken in both of the films that this article examines. The grandparents’ adult children are dead or absent. They are replaced by grandchildren; this newfound proximity to youth reshapes the grandparents’ old age. Here, the concept of the grandfather—reflected in the figure of the grandson—explores how old age and the associated masculine values radically alienate older men from contemporary Colombian society, predominantly comprising a significantly younger population, which turns older men into a symbol of a better time. In other words, grandfathers become beacons of selflessness, sacrifice, and devotion to younger generations.

This article examines the representations of grandfatherhood to integrate the present-day patriarchal role that is socially imposed on men with the image of this older generation in cinema. In line with the work of Alejandro Klein and Ana Lucía Marín Rengifo, films such as those by Rincón and Mendoza engage with a social reality wherein men can utilize grandparenthood as an opportunity to establish new and closer bonds with their grandchildren than those they had with their children.[8] International migration, forced displacement, and the increasing role of women in salaried labor have been changing the role of grandfathers as they now take up more care activities in the absence of the parents. After a period in which they are not called upon to care for the youngest members of the family, grandfathers are provided with greater opportunity to live with their grandchildren and thereby forge new forms of intergenerational kinship. This new importance contrasts with the available studies on cultural depictions of aging male care providers. Amelia DeFalco and Alex Hobbs have noted the lack of scholarship on European and US cultural expressions that focus on masculine grandparenthood.[9] Generally, the few available studies have endeavored to dispel the idea of a single way of living and representing aging masculinity. Hobbs highlights that numerous “individual characters cannot be simply categorized as well or frail, proving that masculinity in late life is, like any other stage, not static but transient and performative.”[10] This is the case with Tierra en la lengua and La ciudad de las fieras, in that grandfatherhood, as a cinematic trope, helps transform flawed men into responsible, caring beings who realize their reproachful character in sickness and pain.

In both films, the grandfathers’ wives have died, allowing the plots to focus on aged masculinity while stressing the importance of the reproductive work of mourning. In Frames of War, Judith Butler explains that grieving humanizes not only the dead but also those who mourn, revealing the importance granted to the survivors.[11] Grieving eventually establishes a community that positions its members as part of a political force. Butler points out that these frames of war are used by mainstream media and culture to make sense of loss. In other words, a life’s value is based on what its death represents, depending on a series of factors that “apprehend or, indeed, fail to apprehend the lives of others as lost or injured.”[12] Butler proposes that public grieving serves to make those who suffer pain and death visible to an audience that is compelled to take ethical responsibility. Indeed, mainstream forms of grief appeal to an affective shock and play on the emotions of public opinion.

Butler’s concept of non-grievable lives offers useful ways of understanding the depiction of death and its grievers. The concept of a grievable life has been commonly used to analyze the visibility of grief of certain groups in the context of post-conflict transitional justice. For instance, Alicia Natali Chamorro Muñoz, Giovana Suárez Ortiz, and Biviana Unger Parra examine how the Colombian justice system restricts the understanding of the vulnerability of trans women, limiting the recognizability of their humanity as victims, a finding that is in line with those of Herrera Sánchez and Valencia’s study of mainstream discourse on femicide across Latin America.[13] In the context of aging masculinity, exploring male vulnerability in light of Butler’s concept invites attention to the condition of how patriarchal renewal in films—such as Rincón’s and Mendoza’s—recognizes the lives of both the dying and the grieving grandfathers who seek to attune to a patriarchy that has changed in the aftermath of the Colombian armed conflict. As observed in films such as Acevedo’s La tierra y la sombra, unemployment and forced displacement have led to changes in the aesthetic representation of traditional patriarchal authority. The result highlights a more sensitive revalorization of child caring when the reproduction of life has been challenged.

In Tierra en la lengua and La ciudad de las fieras, grieving is presented as the interpretive framework that accounts for the restitution of the grandfather as a man who cares about his family, inviting the viewer to evaluate aging masculinity in terms of its weakness and resilience. In these films, grieving takes on different states or meanings—such as being a widower, being unable to perform duties in the field, and dying from a progressive, unspecified illness. This analysis illustrates that the re-inscription of patriarchal masculine values in the wake of weakened health is symbolic of men who are unable to cope with their own body, rendering their social role increasingly dysfunctional and obsolete. Renewing masculinity contrasts with the cinematic image of grandfatherhood that, as Redding asserts, presents old age “in negative terms and situates aging bodies within medicalized narratives of decline.”[14] In fact, the focus on aging masculinity as defined as a medical problem usually extends the dominance of institutionalized social control, justifying coercion by focusing on curing diseases.[15] In this line of thought, medicalization can easily lead to the simplification of sociological models of illness and disability markers.[16] However, Tierra en la lengua and La ciudad de las fieras depart from these discourses of the medicalization of old age. Mature male characters exist to become helpful to the younger generations. Owing to their weakened bodies, they portray old age as a moment of restoration. Elderly and decrepit masculinity can be saved by an old male character who realizes the importance of care work that highlights values other than the ones imposed by neoliberalism based on individualism and autonomy. In this way, aging men show how offering shelter and sharing skills with their descendants can be soothing, not only for the young but also for the grandfathers.

The Dying Landowner on the Vanishing Ranch

Tierra en la lengua depicts a dying landowner who invites his adult grandchildren to his hacienda to familiarize them with his business that they will inherit. However, the grandfather learns in spending time with his grandchildren that they are uninterested in managing his estate. Mendoza’s film invites the audience to appreciate traditional patriarchal values such as resilience and bravery in an older adult once given to fanatical patriotism, unfaithfulness, or even arrogance.

Tierra en la lengua was predominantly shot in Casenave, in the department of Llanos Orientales (Eastern Plains), a sparsely populated plateau in western Colombia. This film draws on director Mendoza’s personal history, especially in the use of home footage that shows his grandfather, Don Silvio, playing with his grandchildren. The film’s plot centers on Silvio Vega, a man in his seventies who suffers from an illness that has forced him to make a drastic decision: to bring two of his grandchildren—Fernando and Lucía—back home from Bogotá. Silvio suffers from a progressive condition related to the urinary system that causes sudden and excruciating spasms in his lower abdomen.

Silvio prepares to transfer the farmland to his grandchildren on the condition that Fernando shoots him in the heart, thereby ending his pain. In a scene in which the grandfather and grandson exit the car to urinate on the side of the road, the camera is positioned at ground level to show their streams of urine, revealing Silvio’s difficulty in maintaining a constant flow. His pain may be caused by prostate cancer. Mendoza constructs this illness as a symbol not only of the decaying male body but of diminished masculinity. Once a misogynistic, womanizing, uncompromising, and punishing patriarch, Silvio is unable to control even his own body.

While the story of a self-made aging patriarch may seem commonplace, Mendoza’s film, in showing Silvio’s weakness, redeems the character’s life right before death. The figures of the grandmother and the grandchild are central to recovering this lost position of authority. Much of the dialogue characterizing Silvio is derived from interviews with Mendoza’s grandmother (Rosa Avella), who recalls her own husband with all his contradictions and without any judgment. Her recollections include Don Silvio’s youth during the worst years of La Violencia in the 1950s, when he proved his physical strength, courage, and resilience by successfully escaping two kidnapping attempts and surviving a third. Mendoza asks his grandmother, “How is it that a woman as beautiful as yourself, so intelligent, falls in love with a guy like my grandfather?”[17] She responds:

This story evokes a common character in the tropical regions of Colombia that Peter Wade has called the cazador (the hunter man), that is to say, a man who is “legally married, with the main wife, sometimes known as the ‘seating woman’ [mujer de asiento] (the sitting has several meanings, including site, permanence, and stability), and other women, often called the ‘darlings’ [amantes] (lovers).”[18] Despite this, the grandmother’s comment about her dying husband takes on a more benevolent role in an introduction that places both her and her husband in a kind of family pantheon of figures that need to be remembered together.[19] The grief over the loss of the grandfather that the film anticipates cannot be understood separately from the grandmother’s loss, because it is precisely the figure of the widower that opens up the possibility of humanizing male characters.

With Rosa already dead and Silvio mourning her, the film stresses humanization and loss. Nevertheless, the old home footage that the film shows on several occasions has the aura of archival material that suggests the value of the irretrievable. Without Rosa, Silvio can no longer deftly navigate his world, as a painful disease bears down on him, and he must face the urgency of leaving behind a legacy. Thus, the grandfather’s traditional masculinity is doubly damaged by illness and the death of his wife. Ultimately, Rosa was instrumental in providing the emotional support Silvio needed through the rough years, when he both survived the insurgent violence and managed to appropriate the land of his now vast hacienda. His physical strength and savviness are irremediably linked to Rosa’s presence. It is only in her absence, and due to his weakness, that he recognizes her support. This recognition adopts the form of melancholy and remorse.

Butler explains that the grieving framework draws on ambiguity.[20] In this case, public grievance invariably leaves room for what and who can be shown as grievable, transforming traces or partial stories into sources of pain representable only for certain subjects: “[F]raming presupposes decisions or practices that leave substantial losses outside the frame, [leading us] to consider that full inclusion and total exclusion are not the only options. Indeed, there are deaths that are partially eclipsed and partially marked, and that instability may well activate the frame, making the frame itself unstable. So, the point would not be to locate what is ‘in’ or ‘outside’ the frame, but what vacillates between those two locations, and what, foreclosed, becomes encrypted in the frame itself.”[21] In this way, Rosa comes in and out of the frame depending on how her testimony helps Silvio on his journey to redeem his past. As Rosa’s comment indicates, the grandfather’s personality is constructed with a whole constellation of masculine values associated with political violence, including the uncompromising defense of political ideals. In this sense, the mention of the 1950s, which signals the origin of the political violence that the country has suffered throughout the last seventy years, is incidental.[22] Indeed, Silvio’s masculinity is tied to that moment. Despite being the target of three kidnapping attempts, the last of which was successful, Silvio’s resolve was only briefly shaken; within a few weeks, he returned to his characteristically reckless behavior. The armed conflict in Colombia created a social terrain wherein conceptions of masculinity have been negotiated in the exercise of power with authority conferred on men.[23]

María Rocío Cifuentes Patiño asserts that men are expected to engage in public life more than women, leading to a contradiction of freeing them from domestic and emotional work while reinforcing gender roles. Moreover, “they gain status in the eyes of certain groups and in their own eyes through their use of icons of power (weapons, cars, motorcycles, uniforms) and creating the same identifications with the masculine roles they play.”[24] The daring man, committed to politics and defined by the constant struggle to maintain his position of power, is the one that Rosa praises. On the one hand, the portrayal of such daring masculinity is used as part of a mechanism of repair that recasts how to view this figure. As Rosa’s testimony implies, stubbornness and sectarianism become a way for Silvio to distinguish himself in a violent past, where he achieved power, and a ruinous present. This is associated, first, with the grandchildren’s disinterest in rural life and tradition and, second, with his serious illness. On the other hand, the grandfather’s tenacity contains the power of that unifying, community-forming identity—one that makes him a kind of guardian of a productive unit subject to harsh conditions amid insurgent violence.

The severe decline of the estate displayed in the film mirrors Silvio’s decline as its patriarch. As Silvio’s disease progresses, the ranch also symbolically suffers from its effects. Animals die, tools are destroyed, and the staff resigns (see Figure 1). The grandfather portrayed in Tierra en la lengua is a synecdoche of a degraded productive space that will soon be lost with his death. The losses, those of the grandfather and his land, complement and contaminate each other in such a way that distinguishing them when explaining the affective politics behind male decline is difficult. The hacienda in Los Llanos has lost its place both figuratively (it is not anchored to a particular topographical and geographical space) and literally (it is never mentioned by name). Moreover, the ghostly atmosphere is also shown in Silvio, who moves over it in an absent, brittle manner (see Figure 2). In simpler words, land and male body become one to meditate on the thin separation between landowner and discourse.

Figure 1. Silvio looking at his dead cattle in Tierra en la lengua (Día Fragma Fábrica de Películas, 2014). The ranch reveals its decomposing nature at a moment when the patriarch is also terminally ill.

Silvio’s illness tied with the vanishing hacienda contrasts with the vigor that he once had, which was also emblematic of nationalistic tropes associated with Los Llanos. The first scenes of Tierra en la lengua mix the audio of the telephone conversation that Silvio has with his grandchildren with images of the trip they all took together to the Los Llanos hacienda several years ago. Thus, we see a series of shots that present the way down from the humid moor to a steppe that becomes increasingly dusty and heralds a territory unlike the versions of Los Llanos portrayed in mass culture. Films such as Talía Osorio Cardona’s Jinetes del paraíso (Horsemen of Paradise, 2020) celebrate Los Llanos as a place that, according to the director, allows the audience to “find their roots as Colombians” predominantly through the region’s cultural richness, nature, and economy.[25] Los Llanos has traditionally been considered a fertile region where livestock are raised on expansive plains controlled by wealthy landowners who appropriated their lands from the Indigenous people, allowing the modernization of this area of the country through the mass domestication of animals.[26] This image stands in stark contrast to Tierra en la lengua, where the cinematic space highlights decay and death. Inhabited by the sick grandfather, Mendoza’s plains are deserted, empty, and unproductive; they fade away gradually, as argued earlier, in line with the progression of Silvio’s illness (see Figure 2).

Figure 2. In the foreground, the grandson rests on unproductive land, while the granddaughter can be seen in the background in Tierra en la lengua (Día Fragma Fábrica de Películas, 2014). Unlike their grandfather, they will never take an interest in the ranch.

Additionally, scenes shot at ground level abound, inviting the viewer to observe the proximity of, for example, the grandchildren resting. These shots emphasize the inertia and weakness of the dying and the grandchildren, who are disinterested in following in their grandfather’s footsteps. A stagnant temporality is suggested, emphasizing the inevitability of what has been established as the destiny of both the grandfather and the farm—their deaths. Meanwhile, Fernando and Lucía are lying in the grass, a scene repeated at various points throughout the film, showing that they, too, are living in a dead zone (see Figure 3). With these sequences, Mendoza captures the contaminating force of the dying patriarch who has lost most of his authority, a force that will claim both him and his land.

Figure 3. The grandfather walks barefoot across his ranch in Tierra en la lengua (Día Fragma Fábrica de Películas, 2014). We see both slowly meet their end, a process the grandchildren will make irreversible.

The ground-level shots also explore the remoteness of the bare horizon that sets off this (un)productive space. These images recall a type of cinema that has emerged in recent decades that does not seek to catalog the territory or assign it a place within a commercial narrative. Instead, according to María Ospina, such films represent a “rural turn” and examine rural space as a visual problem.[27] Ospina argues that until the first decade of the twenty-first century, Colombian cinema favored narratives centered on the city, where violence generally emerged in urban conflicts tied to poverty or drug trafficking. However, as better security conditions and alliances with international production companies came about, filming in inhospitable regions became possible. Hence, an increasing number of films now explore the dynamics of violence from a rural perspective—as in Tierra en la lengua. The film offers a nontraditional, disorienting depiction of rural space, with close-up shots of the hacienda cropping out the surrounding land and vistas so we cannot appreciate the dimensions of the territory (see Figures 1–3). Furthermore, the film lacks aerial shots, distinguishing this portrayal of the farm from representations of the plains that, as mentioned above, celebrate great expanses of territory and their landowners. Mendoza’s film does not even name this hacienda that has lost all its splendor, giving way to mourning, illness, and eventually suicide, when the grandfather kills himself at the film’s end.

Silvio wishes to be shot while he is overlooking the river such that his body will fall in it and be carried downstream, thus creating an important social and visual symbolism: the merging of Silvio and the river. As Juana Suárez explains, the river is a recurring symbol in Colombian cinema, appearing as early as the beginning of the civil war in the 1950s.[28] It functions as a cinematic space that has historically surveyed thousands of nameless bodies, and it shows the impossibility of mourning the dead. In fact, the cinema of that time was not interested in reestablishing the deceased’s identity but in representing the problems incited by the corpse’s discovery in small towns, as in Julio Luzardo’s El río de las tumbas (Dead Men’s River, 1964). Films such as El río de las tumbas focus on the complexity of political violence, in particular the impossibility of identifying the parties in the conflict and the state’s disinterest in protecting ordinary citizens. Hence, the river provides metaphors that stage a territory of conflicting responsibilities that are never accepted. In the final scene, Silvio, once dead, is covered in a shroud and placed on a wooden platform for the river to carry him away, evoking corpses in films such as El río de las tumbas. Unlike those corpses, this body has a specific identity that defines him not merely as an individual but as the image of the grandfather who found redemption at the end of his life. If, in the films of the mid-twentieth century, the dead in the river were anonymous and could not be mourned, in Tierra en la lengua the dead grandfather is depicted as an individual who can finally experience redemption. This final scene wherein his dead body drifts downstream offers an emotional framework that humanizes the grandfather. Thus, the film ends with a gesture of naming the dead man and consequently contrasts with the mourning of the unknown dead that populated Colombian rivers in the 1950s.

In her analysis of the visual representations of corpses in Colombian cinema from the past twenty years, Ana Guglielmucci argues that bodies floating in the river led to “diverse tactics and mourning rituals [that] create a symbolic and physical landscape capable of making sense of profoundly dehumanizing acts which would otherwise be perceived as senseless.”[29] The passage of time, combined with the increase in violence, has precipitated a new way of accounting for the unnamable, which now takes the form of what Guglielmucci calls necroscapes. In short, she refers to the landscape on which “corporeality” is reconfigured in relation to necro power, which, in Colombia, is set against the backdrop of a decades-long conflict.[30] In a territory where death is a material reality, the corpse enables a “confrontation with different forms of death in life and with the nameless, unmourned dead that impels the vernacular gaze inquiring into these experiences and opens the possibility of picturing national communities in affective terms beyond those of mourning.”[31] Whereas Guglielmucci examines the place of the corpse already detached from its life and humanity, Tierra en la lengua offers the before of a corpse, showing Silvio’s life, which in the context of war, Colombian rivers ordinarily expunge. This helps reimagine violent masculinity in more benign terms. While Silvio’s final days reflect weakness considering his illness, they also soften his past violence, making it invisible or at least problematizing any definite picture of it.

Tierra en la lengua reimagines the figure of the strong landowner, making the figure fragile, fallible, and the symbol of the end of an era. The importance of that weakness becomes clear if we consider Orlando Pardo’s Karmma (2006) as a counterpoint. Karmma is a feature film that shares some characteristics with Tierra en la lengua. It narrates the story of Juan Diego Valbuena, a landowner from Los Llanos who, like Silvio, is kidnapped by a guerrilla group. However, unlike Silvio, Juan Diego ends up in the hands of a guerrilla group who used to work with his son, Santiago Valbuena. In short, Karmma focuses on the skill and resilience of a grandfather who manages to escape from guerrilla captivity. In the process, he reinforces the idea of the generous and charismatic landowner who, for example, hands over his last pesos to a woman in need while in captivity. Contrary to the image of an old but still influential man, Tierra en la lengua portrays a landowner who has only the memory of his past actions remaining, kept alive in the voice of his late wife. In contrast to Pardo’s approach to the figure of the landowner, Tierra en la lengua does not portray the image of male generosity and charisma by depicting a resilient, public man. Indeed, Silvio is a private citizen who—as a shadow of the man he once was—relies on his grandchildren, and not on his son, to recapture a certain social position lost due to aging.

Interestingly, Mendoza also differentiates his visual politics from several films that focus on intergenerational relationships in the context of war to problematize the notion of responsibility. Ospina explains, “Numerous Latin American films that address stories of violence, political crisis, and poverty have used the figure of the child or young adults on the screen to articulate the relationship between witness, memory, and history and reflect on categories such as nation, identity, social class, and gender.”[32] If Ospina emphasizes how recent Colombian cinema uses the landscape as a modernization mechanism to represent new ways of confronting historical memory, generally scrutinizing the actions of adults through the eyes of young characters who become their victims, I claim that Mendoza reverses this trend. By focusing on Silvio, the director compares him to his grandchildren, the witnesses of his decline, to show the grandfather as a victim of a world that now looks past him. The image of Silvio’s masculinity tainted by age is framed by Fernando and Lucía’s visit. Although Mendoza’s film criticizes Silvio’s violent masculinity, it also relativizes it, particularly compared to the grandson, who is portrayed as cowardly. Silvio’s suicide only proves that his dream that his grandson will work the ranch will never be realized since the two generations are so disconnected. Toward the end of the film, Fernando and Lucía’s true intentions become evident when Agustín, Fernando’s friend, appears on the scene. Agustín, who at first comes to check on Silvio’s health, ends up being their supplier of “pepas” (LSD). Thus, while Silvio is suffering in bed, Agustín, Fernando, and Lucía are outside celebrating his final hours, intoxicated and exhibiting their true feelings in a moment of hurtful honesty, which presumably is what provokes Silvio to commit suicide. Agustín, Fernando, and Lucía, now high, verbally harass the grandfather, reminding him that they will soon inherit his ranch. The sequence ends with a close-up of Silvio lying on the terrace in front of the house with a knife buried in his heart.

Tierra en la lengua’s final moments show that passing the ranch to the next generation is impossible. To some extent, Silvio finds Fernando and Lucía undeserving, like the rest of their family, suggesting the impracticality of any union between generations. Suicide precludes an ending that would have allowed us to see the signature on the transfer of hereditary rights to his grandchildren and, with it, the triumph of patrimonial continuity. The aging man reverses the logic of male sacrifice, usually tied to the violent defense of the family as an institution and the nation. Here, male sacrifice means something different. While Silvio owns large swaths of land in Los Llanos Orientales, his authority stems from living in a world that has passed him by but that, in the end, allows him to recover his masculinity in the very act of his resignation. Representing the grandfather in this manner is related to affective politics framed by sensitivity without ever falling into pathos. Indeed, Silvio, aware of his moral authority, keeps at bay all the moral weakness implicit in accepting values or actions that he considers unmasculine, such as suicide.

Grandfatherhood and the Stakes of the Traditional Economy

Youth representation has been central to Colombia’s twenty-first-century film boom. Víctor Gaviria’s groundbreaking film Rodrigo D: no futuro (Rodrigo D: No Future, 1990) set the stage for this trend by casting amateur actors, often from the very communities depicted on-screen, to authentically portray the experiences of young people during the urban crisis caused by drug trafficking and forced displacement in the country.[33] This is evidenced by films such as La ciudad de las fieras, as well as Juan Andrés Arango García’s La Playa D.C. (2012), Óscar Ruiz Navia’s Los hongos (The mushrooms, 2014), Juan Sebastián Mesa’s Los nadie (The Nobodies, 2016), and Catalina Arroyave Restrepo’s Los días de la ballena (Days of the Whale, 2019). All these productions present rap and graffiti as ways of resisting violence, marginalization, job insecurity, and drug trafficking, thus imagining new alliances among young people. Ultimately, the urban spaces and historical periods represented in these films differ, but they share in the notion that a more peaceful society is now possible in the post-conflict context. Ospina argues that representations of childhood and adolescence in recent Colombian cinema leave “open the question of the social and moral nature of the bond of these young people with a broader national community. In exploring how youth survives [sic] these non-domestic spaces, [representations of youth] raise the relationship between the psychic and emotional legacies of war and work and economic survival, a theme that is central to any post-conflict scenario and that in the Colombian case is related to debates about the past (memory, reparations, justice) and the future (for example, the reintegration of the combatants and the reorganization of the city in peace).”[34] Seen this way, the lives of young people represent a vital dimension to reconcile a country at war that has suppressed spaces of care and reproduction. It is thus no coincidence that such films highlight the divide between the lives of youth and an adult population previously in charge of reproduction in society and protecting young people. The generational divide frequently works as a mirror reflecting the lack of support and understanding of an older sector of the population that has abandoned a younger one to its fate.

In Rincón’s La ciudad de las fieras, the figure of the grandfather, Octavio, functions to break the circle of violence and death. In this way, Rincón stands out among contemporary Colombian directors. The film depicts Octavio’s grandson, Fabián, turning to his grandfather, who lives in a rural region, to escape the city and thus envisions a better future outside of a city in crisis. Choosing to film between Medellín and a countryside not far from the same city, Rincón shows a set of contrasts and oppositions in a city transformed by gangs and drug trafficking that primarily affects the youth and a rural area that is emblematic of Antioquia, where floriculture determines the pace of the economy and traditions. Fabián Zapata, who has recently lost his mother, and his two friends, Pitu and La Crespa, navigate the city streets on foot and via public transportation. As they move through the urban landscape, they engage in two forms of artistic expression: graffiti and rap. Rincón introduces the characters in scenes where the city is an elusive protagonist, as we see with the panoramic images taken from the slopes; the city of Medellín is never in full view due to the use of brief takes or obstructed views of the recently established neighborhoods. Here, these scenes from the slopes of the mountains, many of them at night, show a diffused city, like several other Andean cities failing to permeate the identity of the youth who live there.

After his mother dies, Fabián receives the news that he will live with his grandfather, Octavio Zapata, until he is eighteen. Although Fabián is initially resistant, death threats from gang members force him to reconsider and depart for his grandfather’s farm. The trip is represented as a moment of transformation for Fabián and for the audience, who observe an open space, the opposite of the city. Unlike Tierra en la lengua’s Los Llanos, the countryside of this film is idyllic. The director shows a green valley that leads to Octavio’s farm and garden, an area that signals that the reproduction of life is still possible. In this picture-perfect scene, the territory of old age indicates a way of living devoted to activities that lend order to everyday life and represent the region’s traditions.

Octavio takes part in the traditional economy of Antioquia, an important component of the campesino identity of the region. He is a flower grower and a silletero, one of the hundreds of people who, once a year, sell their flower arrangements at the popular and long-standing Feria de las Flores (Flower Fair).[35] This is the last year that Octavio will participate in the festival, and Fabián tries, unsuccessfully, to convince him not to abandon it. Octavio gradually incorporates his grandson into his daily routine by teaching him the trade that he will come to accept—first as a way to repay his grandfather for lodging and food and then as a safe route to changing his life.

The grandfather’s retirement is tied to his fragile health. If Octavio’s medical condition is increasingly desperate, the arrival of his grandson brings hope that the tradition of the silleteros will be carried on. Some scenes capture how masculinity is reflected through a regional practice that highlights cohesive modes of behavior in the Colombian countryside (see Figure 4). Through the grandfather-grandson relationship, the film shows how disinterest in Antioquian heritage among the youth—especially those raised in a city defined by individualism—might be reversed. In fact, the fragile union between the two characters explains how labor can bridge generational gaps, reestablishing the place of a respected family member and healing the lost patriarchal bond.

Figure 4. The grandfather and grandson working together in La ciudad de las fieras (Héroe Films, 2021). Fabián (Bryan Cordoba) is extremely attentive when learning the trade of a floriculturist.

For reasons the film never explains, Fabián’s parents separated when he was still a child, and he has not heard from his father since the separation. Throughout the film, the father is a ghostly figure, and when Fabián asks his grandfather if he or his father tried to look for him, the answer suggests that the bond between his parents was irrevocably broken. Later, however, Octavio confesses that Fabián’s father is not dead and drives Fabián back to the city. This moment sets up Octavio’s character transformation as he accepts responsibility for his role in the neglect his grandson has suffered. It also establishes a new docile behavior that is emblematic of patriarchal renewal. Octavio’s choice to care for Fabián’s well-being (and consequently the reconciliation for confrontations past) will eventually confirm the countryside as an ultimate refuge from violence, which, in the film, is exclusively urban.

Refusing to depict dying youth—the fate of many in Medellín—as inevitable, Rincón positions the grandfather as a symbolic caregiver who provides Fabián with a safe home, work, and a creative outlet. While the killing of Pitu (Fabián’s only male friend), who dies defending Fabián from drug dealers, confirms that Medellín is an uninhabitable city, ultimately, Octavio will stand in for Fabián’s mother, providing emotional and material support, reestablishing the reproductive order that the death of his mother had broken. The absence of women becomes relevant not so much because their deaths allow them to be mourned, but because they humanize the men who survive them. The dead grandmother in this film serves as backstory for the grandfather’s development; in grieving for her, he accepts responsibility and, finally, restores family harmony by taking care of Fabián. Indeed, La ciudad de las fieras is interested in reproductive work, creating continuity from one generation to the next through the masculinization of care. Like Tierra en la lengua’s Silvio, Octavio is a widower with parentless grandchildren who achieves prominence by relying on activities related to the domestic sphere. Silvio shares time with his grandchildren; Octavio provides them with actual shelter.

One of the differences between the two films rests in their depictions of actual care work and the benign centrality of the grandson in La ciudad de las fieras. While Fernando and Fabián are both from the city, only the latter helps his grandfather survive widowhood. As Fabián needs Octavio to survive his mother’s death, the audience appreciates the transformation of an older man who sees his grandson’s need for shelter as an opportunity to—as Alejandro Klein claims—build a renewed bond with the younger generation.[36] Following Hobart and Kneese, Rincón shows reproductive work “as an affective connective tissue between the inner self and the outer world, . . . [that] constitutes a feeling with, rather than a feeling for, others. When mobilized, it offers visceral, material, and emotional heft to act for preservation that spans a breadth of localities: selves, communities, and social worlds.”[37] Above all, care turns out to be inseparable from any effort to survey shared practices that help cope with inequality, youth unemployment, or institutional neglect. In this way, care helps us challenge the concept of kindship, providing a fruitful terrain wherein intimacy meets the communal.

In La ciudad de las fieras, the domestic setting allows the male gaze to regain prominence and simultaneously invites the audience to be part of it. Framing the grandfather in the context of care requires the camera movement to slow down and appreciate change in both the grandfather, who has agreed to take in Fabián, and the grandson, who is now committed to continuing Octavio’s work. For instance, the scene in which he observes Fabián taking shelter from the rain, the camera transitioning from an omniscient to a subjective shot as the grandfather looks out the window, emphasizes his pleasure at a boy who has increasingly shown interest in following his footsteps (see Figure 5). Captured in a close-up that gently gives way to the object of Octavio’s gaze, Fabián is hard at work learning the floriculturist trade. Octavio’s pride is palpable in this scene in which the director provides the grandfather the power of the gaze, emphasizing that he is recovering his traditional position, which he has lost in his old age due to his illness, widowhood, and isolation.

Laura Mulvey’s concept of the “male gaze,” coined in the 1970s to describe how viewers identify with visual media, theorizes the power of the male gaze in Western cinema, particularly in Hollywood, as one in which the man is “the bearer of the look,” whereas the woman is “the bearer of the meaning.”[38] Although this concept is more accurately described as a heterosexual, masculine gaze, it helps us recognize the male gaze as constitutive of the meanings and pleasures gleaned by mainstream audiences. I would argue that grandfatherhood serves to expand the limits of male pleasure; in La ciudad de las fieras, the gaze is not sexualized. As looking/framing the grandchild becomes increasingly relevant to the viewer’s experience, the grandfather becomes both the bearer of the look (the camera takes his position) and the bearer of its meaning (as he is depicted looking at his grandson).

Figures 5 and 6. The grandfather’s pride in La ciudad de las fieras (Héroe Films, 2022). Octavio looks at his grandson, who is committed to continuing the legacy of silleteros in Antioquia.

Seeing through the grandfather’s eyes, the audience appreciates Fabián sitting on some bricks, working, sheltered from the weather (see Figure 6)—an indication of what grandfatherhood represents in the film, or the actions of a responsible man who now appreciates taking care of his grandson. Butler explains that some images in the context of war or extreme violence manage to move the public to engage with the victims, taking their position and feeling their grief.[39] In other words, these scenes shape how to feel and respond, in ethical terms, to the suffering of others. They train the audience’s gaze to see life as valuable. Drawing on this idea, the camera angle shifts from the interior of Octavio’s home to the garden (see Figures 5 and 6), making viewers take the old man’s position. In doing so, viewers witness a devoted grandson who is now eager to give his life the purpose it did not have before moving to the countryside. These shifts also make visible whose perspective the audience is occupying. Unlike the obstructed camera angles that defamiliarize the urban space of Medellín earlier in the film, this sequence shows how the control of the gaze is returned to Octavio and, consequently, to the viewer.

Here, the male gaze turns into a mechanism that explains how weakness and masculinity work in this film. In the context of care work, Octavio gazing at Fabián from the kitchen speaks to how the limits between public and private are in crisis—especially as the domestic cannot remain separate from male redemption in a time of weakened traditional patriarchal values. The significance of domestic work is the result of neoliberal politics, which has primarily destroyed traditional economies with the imposition of the free market, thereby precipitating unemployment and conflict that have separated families such as Fabián’s.[40] Thus, while women have disappeared from the domestic realm they have historically belonged to, men have taken their place without losing their masculine authority. In this way, frames of grandfatherhood are responsible for mitigating the crisis of care that the city has exacerbated in young lives such as Fabián’s—a concern that, historically speaking, corresponds to post-conflict periods.

Close to the end of the film, the audience realizes that Octavio has helped Fabián in his grieving process in several ways. First, embracing his new job, Fabián participates in the Flower Fair, taking his grandfather’s place as he carries a deeply symbolic flower arrangement on his back. Now what Fabián was doing while his grandfather was observing him is made clear: he was creating a funerary crown with an elegant design. The crown depicts the three friends—Pitu, La Crespa, and Fabián—in the meeting place looking toward Medellín, a city where none of the three remain. The design, created with his grandfather’s guidance, fosters healing and memory. Octavio thus provides care and shares his traditions while also recreating the protective masculinity of a paternal figure previously erased by the absence of Fabián’s father.

In the end, what Octavio brings back to his grandson’s life is a symbol of the power of a patriarchal order based on care work. In La ciudad de las fieras, the mother’s death shifts the perspective on the reproduction of life toward the grandfather, and thus the viewer must adopt Octavio’s perspective. Grief transforms Fabián and his grandfather, who together reconfigure what it means to care for each other in a Colombia filled with families broken apart by war and drug trafficking. Therefore, the reunion between the grandfather and the grandson encourages moving past mourning for the mother to focus on male care. The form that care takes preserves a traditional livelihood and allows Fabián to rap again, as seen in the last scene when he manages to rap in public without losing his concentration.

Conclusion: Receiving Care in Neoliberal Colombia

The vulnerability of older men in contemporary Colombian cinema becomes the starting point of a transformation rather than simply a transition—the transition to death. The two films analyzed in this article remind us that the context of post-conflict Colombia and neoliberal violence have heightened the need for intergenerational care to make social and cultural continuity and survival possible. This situation provides aging men with the opportunity to redefine and redeem their masculinity, as they are needed in different ways. However, this redefinition and redemption is handled differently in both films. The countryside has the potential to be a refuge, but this is not always the case. In Tierra en la lengua, the hacienda becomes a metonymical space of the dying grandfather and, with him in it, of decaying patriarchal values. By contrast, La ciudad de las fieras features a restorative orchard in which capensino labor can be passed to a younger generation. Consequently, this space facilitates a symbolic reproduction of life in the context of urban violence.

The absence of women has the potential to allow men to flourish in roles that patriarchal societies have usually denied to men (and conversely, view men as more human, compared to the women who have died). In this sense, in both films, fragility and illness lead the grandfathers to protect their grandchildren. Perhaps where the two grandfather figures differ is not in their willingness to provide some form of care to their grandchildren, but in the ways each one is open to receiving care, which would mean accepting their weaknesses as part of their identity and even as part of their masculinity. Such an intergenerational exchange of shelter and emotional support could divide traditional and, ultimately, more successful care practices from neoliberal autonomy, individualism, and self-care. In this line of thought, Henry Rincón’s La ciudad de las fieras and Rubén Mendoza’s Tierra en la lengua use the figure of the grandfather to survey the social dimension of neoliberalism that has revalued domestic work due to the destruction of community ties in contexts such as both urban and rural violence, the dismantling of public health systems, and the scarcity of resources for social policies, an apparent reality in neoliberal Colombia.

1. Sayak Valencia and Sonia Herrera Sánchez, “Pornomiseria, violencia machista y mirada colonial en los filmes Backyard: El Traspatio y La mujer del Animal” [Pornomisery, sexist violence, and the colonial gaze in the films Backyard: El Traspatio and La mujer del Animal], Anclajes [Anchors] 24, no. 3 (2020): 7−27. ↑

2. Art Redding, “A Finish Worthy of the Start: The Poetics of Age and Masculinity in Clint Eastwood’s Gran Torino,” Film Criticism 38, no. 3 (2014): 17. ↑

3. Redding, 17. ↑

4. Redding, 18. ↑

5. Redding, 17. ↑

6. Sally Chivers, The Silvering Screen: Old Age and Disability in Cinema (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2011), xx. ↑

7. Chivers, 3. ↑

8. Alejandro Klein, Adolescencia: un puzzle sin modelo para armar [Adolescense: a puzzle without a model kit] (Montevideo: Psicolibro-Waslala, 2004). ↑

9. Amelia DeFalco, Uncanny Subjects: Aging in Contemporary Narrative (Columbus: The Ohio State University Press, 2010); and Alex Hobbs, Aging Masculinity in the American Novel (Lanham, MD: Rowman and Littlefield, 2016). ↑

10. Hobbs, Aging Masculinity, xxii. ↑

11. Judith Butler, Frames of War: When Is Life Grievable? (London: Verso, 2009). ↑

12. Butler, 1. ↑

13. Alicia Natali Chamorro Muñoz, Giovana Suárez Ortiz, and Biviana Unger Parra, “Morir dos veces: injusticia epistémica e identidad de género en Colombia” [Dying twice: Epistemic injustice and gender identity in Colombia], Universitas Philosophica [Philosophical universities] 38, no. 77 (2021): 15–41; and Valencia and Sánchez, “Pornomiseria.” ↑

14. Redding, “Finish,” 7. ↑

15. Dorothy H. Broom and Roslyn V. Woodward, “Medicalisation Reconsidered: Toward a Collaborative Approach to Care,” Sociology of Health and Illness 18, no. 3 (1996): 357–378, https://doi.org/10.1111/1467-9566.ep10934730. ↑

16. Michael Bury, “The Sociology of Chronic Illness: A Review of Research and Prospects,” Sociology of Health and Illness 13, no. 4 (1991): 451–468, https://doi.org/10.1111/j.1467-9566.1991.tb00522.x. ↑

17. This dialogue is presented in the footage as a recording the director made before shooting the film, when his grandmother was still alive. All translations from Spanish are mine. ↑

18. Peter Wade, “El hombre cazador: género y violencia en contextos de música y bebida en Colombia” [The hunting man: Gender and violence in the contexts of music and drinking in Colombia], La Manzana de la Discordia [The Apple of Discord] 3, no. 1 (2011): 86. ↑

19. Wade, 86. ↑

20. Butler, Frames of War, 73. ↑

21. Butler, 75. ↑

22. La Violencia is a historical period in Colombia, between 1948 and 1958, in which armed confrontations between the Liberal Party and the Conservative Party gained momentum. Although it is not considered a civil war, it was characterized by extreme violence, persecutions, massacres, destruction of private property, and terrorism due to political affiliation. Please see Doug Stokes, America’s Other War: Terrorizing Colombia (London: Zed Books, 2005). ↑

23. Cynthia Cockburn, The Space Between Us: Negotiating Gender and National Identities in Conflict (London: Zed Books, 1998). ↑

24. María Rocío Cifuentes Patiño, “La investigación sobre género y conflicto armado: Research on Gender and Armed Conflict,” Eleuthera 3 (2009): 128. ↑

25. Talía Osorio, “Talía Osorio, directora—Jinetes del Paraíso la película” [Talía Osorio, director—Jinetes del paraíso the film], ceo uniandes, April 30, 2020, YouTube video, 7:13, https://youtu.be/6TEVBWHkyHA. ↑

26. Ivan Luzardo-Luna, Colombia’s Slow Economic Growth: From the Nineteenth to the Twenty-First Century (Cham, Switzerland: Palgrave, 2019). ↑

27. María Ospina, “Natural Plots: The Rural Turn in Contemporary Colombian Cinema,” in Territories of Conflict: Traversing Colombia through Cultural Studies, ed. Andrea Fanta Castro, Alejandro Herrero-Olaizola, and Chloe Rutter-Jensen (Suffolk, UK: Boydell and Brewer, 2017). ↑

28. Juana Suárez, Cinembargo Colombia. Ensayos criìticos sobre cine y cultura colombiana (Cali: Universidad del Valle, 2009). Published in English as Critical Essays on Colombian Cinema and Culture: Cinembargo Colombia, trans. Laura Chesak (New York: Palgrave Macmillan, 2012). ↑

29. Ana Guglielmucci, “Necroscapes: The Political Life of Mutilated and Errant Bodies in the Rivers of Colombia,” Journal of Latin American Cultural Studies 29, no. 4 (2020): 572, https://doi.org/10.1080/13569325.2021.1885356. ↑

30. Drawing from philosopher Achille Mbembe, Guglielmucci explores the concept of necropolitics, which, in the Colombian context, she further differentiates as necroscapes in order to illuminate how everyday life is transformed by the blurring between life and death as a result of persistent violence. In this context, the river becomes a central space at which culture surveys the practices of mourning unidentified deaths. ↑

31. Guglielmucci, “Necroscapes,” 573. ↑

32. Ospina, “Natural Plots,” 154. ↑

33. This approach to youth representation through the use of non-professional actors became a hallmark of Gaviria’s work, as he continued to explore the impact of urban violence on young lives in his 1998 feature film La vendedora de rosas (The Rose Seller), which earned him a second invitation to the prestigious Cannes Film Festival. ↑

34. Ospina, “Natural Plots,” 191. ↑

35. At the beginning of the twentieth century, the silleteros carried flowers on their backs through the steep streets of Medellín, and, starting in the late 1950s, they began to parade through the fair with their flowers wearing black pants, white paruma, white shirts, hats, black ruana, and machetes. Both silletero and the fair are activities declared Patrimonio Cultural de la Nación (Cultural heritage of the nation). “Silleteros son reconocidos como patrimonio inmaterial de la humanidad” [Silleteros are recognized as intangible heritage of humanity], El Colombiano [The Colombian], December 5, 2014, https://www.elcolombiano.com/antioquia/silleteros-son-reconocidos-como-patrimonio-inmaterial-de-la-humanidad-BH832524. ↑

36. Alejandro Klein, “Una aproximación a las formas de relacionamiento abuelos-nietos adolescentes desde perspectivas tradicionales, no tradicionales e inéditas” [One approach to the kinds of links between grandparents-adolescent grandsons from a traditional, non-traditional, and new perspective], Psicología Revista [Psychology magazine] 18, no. 1 (2009): 3. ↑

37. Hi‘ilei Julia Kawehipuaakahaopulani Hobart and Tamara Kneese, “Radical Care: Survival Strategies for Uncertain Times,” Social Text 38, no. 1 (142) (2020): 2, https://doi.org/10.1215/01642472-7971067. ↑

38. Laura Mulvey, “Visual Pleasure and Narrative Cinema,” in Film Theory and Criticism: Introductory Readings, 5th ed., ed. Leo Braudy and Marshall Cohen (New York: Oxford University Press, 1999), 834. ↑

39. Butler, Frames of War, 75. ↑

40. See Irene Vélez-Torres and Daniel Varela, “Between the Paternalistic and the Neoliberal State: Dispossession and Resistance in Afro-descendant Communities of the Upper Cauca, Colombia,” trans. Margot Olavarria, Latin American Perspectives 41, no. 6 (2014): 9−26, https://doi.org/10.1177/0094582X14547515; and Sara Meger and Julia Sachseder, “Militarized Peace: Understanding Post-conflict Violence in the Wake of the Peace Deal in Colombia,” Globalizations 17, no. 6 (2020): 953–973, https://doi.org/10.1080/14747731.2020.1712765. ↑