Los Conductos review – a cryptic Colombian parable

Striking visuals ignite a fragmented yet politically astute film, which follows a man who escaped a cult by killing its leader

This challenging Colombian parable feels like it could have been made in the 1970s, what with its cryptic storytelling, spiritual musings and vivid imagery, all shot on grainy 16mm. Rejecting conventional narrative structures, its story takes some decoding, and may well defy comprehension, but its striking visual language, with vibrant colours, sparse compositions and free-associative editing, casts quite a spell.

Our protagonist is a bearded, long-haired young vagrant named Pinky (Luis Felipe Lozano), whom we first find shooting a man, stealing a motorbike, then getting high in an abandoned warehouse. It transpires he has recently left a cult and has killed its leader. We never see the cult in question, but in voiceover we learn of the hold its leader had on Pinky and other outcasts: We had been miraculously saved from a world that had always seen us as worthless."