The steady drumbeat of life in the first free town in the Americas

Palenque is a film made from rhythms. Musical rhythms, daily rhythms, visual rhythms. Rhythms of work, of speech and of play. It’s also a film that breaks its own stride, shifts focus and doesn’t explain. Enchanting and challenging, it immerses us in a place and a community unlike any other, San Basilio de Palenque, which sits in the foothills near the port city of Cartagena in Colombia.

The first town of enslaved Africans in the Americas to gain freedom from European colonial powers, San Basilio is also the only surviving palenque (meaning ‘walled city’ or ‘fortress’) – the name given to communities of Africans who escaped slavery in Colombia and lived autonomously, often working to free others who were enslaved. In 2005, UNESCO declared the distinctive cultural space of San Basilio de Palenque a ‘Masterpiece of the Oral and Intangible Heritage of Humanity’. The culture of the town remains deeply connected to its African roots with ‘complex funeral rituals and medical practices … evidence of the distinct spiritual and cultural systems framing life and death in the Palenque community. Musical expressions … accompany collective celebrations, such as baptisms, weddings and religious festivities as well as leisure activities.’

Eschewing this historical background, except for a brief explanatory text at the end of his short documentary, the Colombian filmmaker Sebastián Pinzón Silva offers a sensorial experience of life in this town of 3,000 people, more than three centuries after its first inhabitants won their freedom in 1691. Throughout, the many rhythms of people’s lives weave in and around each other, creating a rich sense of the community’s bonds, without any sort of didacticism or fixity of meaning.[…]