Camilo Restrepo

A former cult member tries to restore his life.A couple of times in this short and occasionally exhilarating feature from Colombia, its director, Camilo Restrepo, contrives striking visual juxtapositions. His camera closes in on a dead man’s white shirt, soaked in blood, and focuses on the bullet hole in both the shirt and the man’s chest. It then cuts to a bright red motorcycle fuel tank and a gasoline nozzle going into it. The dark circular hood of a ceiling security camera is replaced by the sight of a gray balloon expanding while being filled with helium.What these connections add up to is … enigmatic. Shot on 16-millimeter film stock that seems as rich in specks and cracks as it is in color, “Los Conductos” takes a long way around in telling its story, one of loneliness, defiance and intractable yearning. Luis Felipe Lozano, an itinerant laborer and nonactor whom Restrepo met in 2013, plays Pinky, a character whose life is based on Lozano’s own. Circuitously, Pinky speaks in voice-over about falling in with a group of people “united by a sense of loss we felt in the world.” But for almost half of the movie, we see him alone. He gazes at Medellín from high ground; he steals a motorcycle; he wields a gun.It is only late in the movie that we piece together his involvement with a cult, and his subsequent desire to seek revenge against its leader, referred to as Father. Father seems, on closer scrutiny, to be nothing more than a ringleader of thieves; in one shot, he holds a messy ball of copper wire, obviously ripped out of stolen electronics.Like “Days of the Whale” (2020), Restrepo’s movie shows us a Medellín that’s far from action-movie drug cartel clichés. Out of Pinky’s marginalized life, Restrepo conjures a lush but nevertheless desolate cinematic atmosphere.Los ConductosNot rated. In Spanish, with subtitles. Running time: 1 hour 10 minutes. In theaters. More