Nightfall of Gods - Short Film

Several Christmases ago, the police broke into my grandmother's house to resolve a family dispute. The reason was not a drunken binge or an inheritance dispute, which is typical at that time of year and the most common; but no, it was a religious argument, an outburst of religious fanatics; while my father and my uncle were choking each other until one of them was left purple. The reason for the conflict: refusing to continue with the prayers that had lasted for more than four hours. This is not an isolated incident, nor is it the only time that religious fanaticism ended up dividing the family. If faith supposes a decision of conviction to find personal peace, why would it put me in danger of death?

What do we believe in? I consider that the human being is an individual developed on the basis of beliefs: moral, political, passionate, religious and so on. To say that a human being does not have beliefs would be to deny his own existence, at least in that he believes, in his place on earth. Colombia is a country infested with beliefs: soccer teams, betting, lottery, pseudosciences to predict the weather, the church one attends, the government in power, the candles of "Saint Money", "meromacho", among others. Many of them make up the folklore and sustain the existence of the country of the Sacred Heart, as some writers call it.

My family are the product of strong Judeo-Christian Catholic traditions, each in their own way, yes, but without giving up houses full of figures of saints, the rosary without fail and the punctual Angelus. I grew up in this environment that, for a long time, I had normalized, and I clarify, I have nothing against Judeo-Christian beliefs, I am against extremism, but even more, I am against contractual obligations. Faith and beliefs are a personal matter, in which neither the State nor another person should tell you what to do. The core of my paternal family is made up of an individual with an emperor complex (or a messiah complex, there are psychotic attacks) and undiagnosed narcissism, and the rest as people to be educated.

Nightfall of Gods was born as a response to rebellion; religious discussion continues to function in this country as a segregator, just like apartheid, where relationships between people who are not from the same religious group continue to be a source of displeasure for many families, or where if a member of the family decides not to follow what is established, they end up being excluded, or ultimately, attacked. The first thing that comes to mind in the series of questions about my family and, above all, about myself, is how to define a sect; in addition to the collective concept defined by the cinema that offers increasingly negative and somewhat inaccurate connotations, these groups exist and have affected generations of families for years.