All the Flowers (Todas Las Flores) is the third film in the three-part series Caribbean Eye: Auteur Cinema from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic. Caribbean Eye is part of the 2024 Fotofocus Biennial: backstories. The biennial theme, backstories, focuses on stories that are not evident at first glance. They offer context for what happened previously or out of view, providing narratives not yet told or presented from a new perspective. Once told, they shed light on current circumstances and events.
About All the Flowers:
With rare exceptions, media accounts of the neighborhood of Santafé in Bogotá, Colombia portray a ghetto without laws or civility, a barrio of thugs, drug dealers, prostitutes, and war criminals willing to hustle any unsuspecting passerby. However, Carmen Oquendo’s experience working closely with residents has shown her other, much more human, aspects of life in this complex environment. After years of working in Santafé and gaining the trust of its residents, Oquendo tells the story of this unique neighborhood in a non-sensational way. All the Flowers is the story of a neighborhood whose residents cling to life fiercely, despite being tremendously, sometimes fatally, impacted by the conditions in the neighborhood they live in. The story is mainly told from the point of view of the trans people that practice paid sexual activities in Santafé, especially those related to Tabaco y Ron (Tobacco and Rum), the oldest brothel in the neighborhood.
Using a raw aesthetic that conveys immediacy, Oquendo follows different characters with a handheld camera as they navigate the brothel and the streets of a rough and unforgiving neighborhood populated with marginalized people displaced by the Colombian civil war. Members of Santafé’s trans community provide the narration and speak about their dreams of a safe space for marginalized people. Vérité-style scenes depict the daily rounds in the neighborhood as they deal with all kinds of situations: from sex workers in desperate need of health services to those surviving homeless and police brutality. Their perspectives are complemented by interviews with the brothel’s residents and administrators, with Santafé’s neighbors, and with politicians. Conceived as a choral portrait, the rhythm of the film’s montage and structure is determined by its portrayal of a group of diverse characters all linked to the centering presence of the brothel.
About Caribbean Eye:
The Caribbean is the site of a dynamic new emerging film culture. In the last decade or so, Caribbean films by an exciting new generation of filmmakers have been winning prizes at international film festivals, finding more distribution than ever before, and surprising viewers around the world with stories that are new for international audiences. The films in the series Caribbean Eye: Auteur Cinema from Puerto Rico and the Dominican Republic tell stories we may not have not heard, and are set in places we may think we know but may not have really seen, using fresh approaches that will leave viewers with new images of the Caribbean and new ideas to think about.