by SARAH ROWLAND

“He’s going to die in Colombia. I know that now.”

Montreal-based filmmaker Germán Gutiérrez is talking about his older brother, Oscar, who recently took a couple of bullets in the face and shoulder. Remarkably, Oscar survived the shooting. But as the only leftist member of Caldas’s regional assembly (equivalent to Provincial MP), he continues to live in constant danger.

Why? Well, as we learn in Germán’s riveting documentary Who Shot My Brother?, Oscar is a marked man because he has these funny notions that Colombian trade unionists shouldn’t be gunned down in the streets, coffee workers shouldn’t live like slaves, and honest farmers shouldn’t be dowsed with carcinogenic pesticides to appease America’s War on Drugs. As you can imagine, he’s made a lot of enemies. Therefore, it was no surprise to Germán when he got the call that his older brother was fighting for his life in some faraway hospital. Of course, that didn’t make hearing the news any easier.

“For 15 seconds I was totally blank,” Germán recalls. “Two hours later, I tried to reach him. But I couldn’t talk to him because his jaw was shattered. After that, I was totally paralyzed for about two months. It was like a kind of emotional limbo. Then once I came out of it, I started working on getting him out of Colombia.”

Germán approached immigration officials from Spain, France, Cuba and Canada. They all agreed to accept Oscar as a political refugee. But Oscar wouldn’t have any of it.

“He will never give it up,” says Germán. “He’s a politician, that’s his passion. And what’s a 50-year-old politician going to do here? Wash dishes? I don’t think so.”

Once Germán came to terms with his brother’s wishes, he figured that the only way he could help him was to make a film that explores Colombia’s very complex history of violence—starting with the opposing leftist paramilitary groups, skimming through the rise of the cartel and ending with the American-financed right-wing National Army. This was in early 2003, but Germán still remembers the day he got off the plane to embark on this daunting, not to mention dangerous, mission.

“I was scared to death,” he says. “My legs were shaking and my palms were sweaty. And the first few days of shooting were extremely difficult because I was afraid. Oscar was afraid. He couldn’t even concentrate on our interviews.”

Which is no wonder. Oscar’s new life consists of wearing a bullet-proof vest, paying for 24-hour security, respecting 10 p.m. curfews and changing his routine every few days. But despite all these extra precautions, Germán is not too optimistic about his brother’s chances of survival. Nor is he very hopeful that there will ever be a ceasefire in his native land.

“I don’t think Colombia has reached rock bottom yet,” he says. “It’s like the Balkans of Latin America, because the war has been there for two or three generations now. It’s more than a civil war or a confrontation between rich and poor. It’s like, ‘I killed your brother, and your son is going to kill my son and over and over.’ It’s terrible to say that. But I just don’t see any solution in the near future.”

Who Shot My Brother? opens Friday, Dec. 9

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