Slamdance Interview: A Ballot Box Revolution in Petro

It’s arguably the dream of every documentarian that they get to revisit the subject of one of their films. The fantasy is that they’ve been doing something interesting in the interim.

So it’s arguably miraculous that, when the filmmakers behind Slamdance Film Festival selection Petro met up with Colombian guerilla and dissident turned politician Gustavo Petro 15 years after making a short film about him, he was beginning an election campaign that would lead him to the country’s presidency.

Producer Trevor Martin and his childhood friend, director Sean Mattison, were introduced to Petro in 2007 when Martin was a student at Tufts University. Another friend of Martin’s, Julian Roberts, worked with him on a short student film about the Colombian political scene, and they brought Mattison in for a follow-up, following Petro. “I was already dabbling in shooting video,” Mattison said, “so we made a student film where we told the story of the work that Petro was doing when he was in the Colombian senate, highlighting the links that existed between paramilitary groups active in the country and the administration of the former president, Álvaro Uribe Vélez.”

While they moved on to other work, they kept an eye on Petro as he became mayor of Bogotá, and then ran two unsuccessful campaigns for president. However, it was his third run, in the 2022 election when he faced off against presumptive right wing frontrunner Federico “Fico” Gutiérrez and Cooombia’s own Trump, mayor of Bucaramanga, businessman, and accused fraudster Rodolfo Hernández Suárez, that they returned to the subject.

It was actually Petro’s surprisingly strong run in the 2018 election that convinced the world and the filmmakers that his was not a fool’s errand, “and in 2021 we saw some early polling that said he might have a chance in ’22,” said Mattison, “so I called Trevor and Julian and said, ‘Maybe we should revisit our old friend.’” In April 2021, they had a phone conversation with Petro and then met in person that September, “and he reluctantly agreed to let us follow him around with cameras.”

In the intervening years, Petro had inevitably changed from the slightly academic firebrand with a controversial past that the filmmakers followed in 2007. “He was more experienced as a politician,” said Martin, “which is both positive and negative. In a positive way, he is more experienced at getting his message out in a way that it going to get people to vote for him, and it’s a more effective tool to achieve his agenda. So if you’re sympathetic to that, I think he’s changed for the better. From a negative, anyone who has been active in such a hyperpolarized environment as Colombia, with such a fanatically aggressive press who pick you apart over every little thing, you can put a shell up and it becomes harder to pull the layers of the onion and get down to the real man.”

In some ways that protective shell was metaphorical, but in others it is very literal. Colombia has been roiled by political violence for decades, and while the country is in a new era of peace and stability, there were a lot of institutions and individuals furious that a guerilla turned progressive elected leader could become president. Mattison estimated that, in the years between the original student film and making this feature, Petro’s security detail had more than quadrupled. On the first day of shooting, he said, “I turned to our co-DP, Tom Laffay and said, ‘Should we be wearing Kevlar vests? Because everybody else is.” Ultimately, they decided not to wear body armor, instead just using common sense, the guidance of those security details, and the sage advice of their Colombia line producers, César Augusto Rodríguez and Álvaro Vásquez Miranda. “They helped us make sure that everything went smoothly and nothing went wrong.”

Well, mostly smoothly. There were some hairy moments with an angry anti-Petro crowd in Medellín, and Laffay’s phone was stolen, “but luckily all of our team members came away from this project unscathed.”

There’s another kind of risk about making a film about a candidate in an election: what if Petro had lost? What story do they tell then? “There would have been some tough conversations, I’ll say that,” laughed Martin. “We were always thinking about the fact that he could lose, and what were ways that we could tell the story in a way that contextualized the campaign.”

For Mattison, Petro is fascinating not because he is president, but because he is in some ways both witness to and a personification of Colombia’s recent history. Just as he was part of the M19 guerilla group and then part of the movement to demobilize militias, so Colombia has seen a complicated growth from terror and counter-terror to a viable, if sometimes uneasy peace. “His story is a prism through which we can look at the larger political history of the country. … If he wasn’t involved in every single moment, he was on the periphery of a lot of important stuff happening.”

Petro is screening as part of the Slamdance Film Festival.