‘Pablo Escobar: El Patron del Mal’ Producer Diego F. Ramírez Launches 64A Docs (EXCLUSIVE)

Rolling off the big breakout box office success of Juan Carvajal’s SXSW world premiered “La Salsa Vive,” the highest-grossing Colombian doc feature in the last five years, 64A Films founder Diego F. Ramírez, one of Colombia’s preeminent fiction producers, has launched a new label, 64A Docs.

Ramírez was one of the producers on Carlos Moreno’s Colombian crime world losers’ tale “Dog Eat Dog” (2008), a foundation stone in a modern, state incentive backed Colombian cinema. He went on to produce Sundance Festival cinematography winner “All Your Dead Ones” (2011), “Pablo Escobar, Patrón del Mal,” one of Colombia’s biggest pre-Netflix TV series, and the Toronto bowed “Killing Jesús,” the sophomore movie of Laura Mora, co-director of Netflix’s “One Hundred Years of Solitude,” its major achievement in Colombia.

All the films and “Escobar” hold up a mirror to a violence that Colombia sometimes chooses to ignore. With “La Salsa Vive,” and its follow-ups, first 64A Docs titles “Petronio, What Lies Beneath the Joy” and a portrait of Colombia’s Blacks and Whites carnival, 64A Docs is explorig a far more positive reality, its cultural resilience. Elements of that – Cali salsa, Afro-Pacific music, a festival inspired by a proud Indigenous people –  though often not recognized, make up potential elements of a far more positive modern multi-ethnic Colombian identity and offer a way out a still conflictive contemporary reality. 

“These three doc features are highly grounded in Colombian reality, turn on cultural legacy, deliver an ethnographic portrait of Colombia which is unknown,” Ramírez told Variety. “Salsa is listened to in China and Sweden but hardly nobody knows where it comes from, or the social impact it has on such a conflictive city such as Cali,” added Cali-born Ramírez.

“La Salsa Vive” delivers some answers. Bowing at South by Southwest (SXSW) in March and also written by Carvajal,  the NYC-based but Cali-born director of the Colombian Film Festival New York, “La Salsa Vive” near kicks off quoting Larry Harlow, the legendary salsa pianist-composer, explaining that “salsa is Afro-Cuban music with a little New York jazz harmony and overtones.” It was also used as a marketing portmanteau name for mambo, guaracha and guajira played in New York from the ‘50s. 

Salsa boomed in Latino New York in the 1970s. When it collapsed, from 1981, Calí, embraced by its populace, took over.  “In Cali, it looks like people live salsa in their heart, it’s not entertainment, it’s more food for the spirit,” says salsa singer Henry Foil, caught in Cali in historical footage. 

Spangled by a multitude of talking heads, led by Ruben Blades, “La Salsa Vive,” high-energy but painstakingly researched, goes on to show how Cali has flourished as salsa’s world capital, also providing an outlet for its youth.

“Cali is Colombia’s third biggest city, and its population 60% Black, taking in displaced persons from other zones,” said Ramírez. “When Cali has begun to accept this, from about 20 years ago – that it’s a city that likes salsa, not other music – it was able to generate salsa schools and huge shows, like Delirio, and the city initiated a transformation. Art, culture, can transform society,” he added.   

Released May 29 by Elba McAllister’s Cineplex, “La Salsa Vive” scored 21,826 admissions by July 3, more than “Leyenda Viva” (18,331, 2022), “Explore Colombia” (13,190, 2024), “La Fortaleza” (8,410, 2020) and “Cuando las aquas se juntan,” (7,382, 2023) the other highest-grossing Colombian doc features in the last five years, according to Cadbox. It’s currently tracking as the second most-watched local movie in Colombia this year, after “La Pena Maxima,” which has sold 146, 569 cinema tickets.  

“La Salsa Vive” is produced by 64A Films and Cinematic in association with South Shore Films and co-production with Telepacífico y EFD Digital. It is backed by Caracol Televisión, Dago García Producciones, Centauro Comunicaciones, Cali’s Secretaría de Turismo and the Gobernación del Valle del Cauca. 

“La Salsa Vive” has scored a distribution deal with Spain, closed by Ramírez. Cineplex has sold the film to Costa Rica, Panama, Peru, Ecuador, Dominican Republic and Puerto Rico. Further significant deals beckon.    

“If there’s anything worse than racism, hating people, where at least their existence is acknowledged, is ignoring them completely,” said Ramírez. “Petronio: What Lies Beneath the Joy” (“Petronio, Lo Que Esconde La Alegría”) studies one such case: Colombia’s Afro-Pacific communities, whose unknown artists travel to compete at Cali’s Petronio Álvarez Festival, held for 10 days in August. 

“Petronio” captures the 28th Petronio Álvarez Festival, now Latin America’s biggest Afro festival, celebrating its music, gastronomy and Biche licor, and even visited last year by the Duke and Duchess of Sussex, Prince Harry and Megan Merkel, who was an invited guest.  

One winning act last year, however, needed to travel eight hours in a launch down their local river and then another hour in the Pacific Ocean to reach port city Buenaventura, three hours from Cali.

If a teaser is anything to go by, “Petronio” takes in a village in the region, made up of humble shacks on the shores of a river. Its inhabitants throw a local fiesta. Their region, however, continues to be devastated by violence. “One day, they’re singing to crowds of 200,000, the next they had problems returning to their village,” said Ramírez. 

Ramírez and Carvajal are already planning a third doc feature, to shoot in Paz in the province of Nariño, on the Colombia-Ecuador border. There just before the Spanish Conquest, fearsome Indigenous community the Pastos, regrouping in the Andes’ Western Cordillera, stopped Inca empire expansion northwards in its tracks. 

The film will take in the modern-day Blacks and Whites Carnival, a festival with parades and floats which has Indigenous origins but later also drew on a syncretic mix of Afro-Colombian and Catholic inspiration, an extraordinary example of the strength of the union of Indigenous and Afro-Colombian traditions, Ramírez said. 

Again, this will be an eye-opening viewing experience for not only international viewers but many Colombians.