La Violencia

If you mention the country of Colombia to most people, two images will often come to mind: coffee and cocaine. But Colombia has an aspect of its history even uglier than drug cartels and far darker than unsweetened coffee. On April 9, 1948, a popular liberal leader was assassinated, throwing the country into a 10-year period of violence and bloodshed.

In the dramatic screenplay La Violencia, this assassination serves as the catalyst for a wealthy businessman to flee to the Colombian coast in search of an exit, but his old college rival and his maid have discovered his hiding place, and they want to retrieve what he stole from them.

La Violencia depicts the fractured relationships of four politically diverse men. One of them, Jorge Gaitán, is the unlucky recipient of the assassin’s bullet. Fleeing businessman Victor Reyes must hire guards from revolutionary idealist Don Orilla to save himself from the ever-nearing approach of Adolfo Herrera. An orchestrator of the assassination, Adolfo is the only man willing to help Victor’s maid in her search for the man who wronged her.

Things don’t go as planned on the Colombian coast, and a midnight meeting in an empty church sets the showdown for the three living men. Each man has his own desires and no man wants to back down.