Revolution’s A Lie

REVOLUTION’S A LIE amasses interwoven portraits of the mundane, blending personal struggle with broader themes of violence and memory.

The film follows Ele, a middle-aged actress navigating a precarious balance between artistic drive and economic survival in New York City. We see her in one of her acting classes rehearsing a seemingly innocuous dialogue. However, the words become weighty and unsettle the students more than what they expected. After class, she rushes to a downtown gallery where a film screening is about to begin.

What starts as casual viewing becomes something more profound. The projected images—a reenactment of the opening scene from Kaneto Shindó’s Kuroneko—have been transplanted from medieval Japan to the Colombian countryside. As Ele watches the brutal violence unfold in the Colombian landscapes, the boundaries between observer and participant begin to dissolve.

The gallery screening becomes the film’s primary narrative as Ele finds herself haunted by the images on screen. Her whispered commentary reveals how the violence she’s witnessing resonates. The film-within-a-film structure creates a meditation on how artists process collective memory and transform historical pain -successfully or unsuccessfully- into creative work.

REVOLUTION’S A LIE is both an homage to Shindó’s masterpiece and an exploration of cultural displacement. By relocating Kuroneko’s imagery to Colombia, the film examines how stories of violence and resistance transcend specific times and places, while asking whether revolution—artistic or political—can ever truly break these cycles, or if it merely continues them in new forms.

Technical Information

28 minutes long
2K color video
Stereo

Supported by

Revolution’s A Lie was made thanks to the timely support of the:

– Foundation for Contemporary Art, New York, USA
– Headlands Center for The Arts, USA
– MacDowell Colony, USA