‘The End of Times’: Colombian filmmakers Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas use AI hallucinations to imagine life beyond capitalism

Premiering at Venice Critics’ Week, Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas turn five decades of family footage into an AI-fuelled attempt to imagine life beyond capitalism

Updated - September 05, 2026 02:04 pm IST

Colombian filmmakers Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas turn five decades of family footage into an AI-fuelled attempt to imagine life beyond capitalism in ‘The End of Times’ | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

A family archive becomes a political excavation in The End of Times, the new Colombian feature by Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas. The 80-minute hybrid documentary, which combines archival footage, fiction, animation, and artificial intelligence, is set for its world premiere in competition at the 41st Venice Critics’ Week, the independent section of the Venice Film Festival, on September 9.

The film is centred on Salomé, a faceless narrator searching through five decades of family recordings to understand her mother’s sadness. The footage comes from Cárdenas’ own extended family and from his grandparents’ house in Buga, a city in Colombia’s Valle del Cauca. The family gatherings recorded there become the film’s strange little time machine with recurring footage from a New Year’s party at the turn of the millennium, VHS home video footage from family get-togethers, and snippets of Colombia’s histories of political violence, economic liberalisation, drug trafficking and colonial exploitation.

Salomé herself is fictional. Cárdenas’ family is real.

“Salome, she doesn’t exist,” Cárdenas says. “She is a pure creation of fiction, but is inspired in part by some of my youngest cousins. A lot of those anecdotes in the narration are inspired by reality.”

A still from ‘The End of Times’ | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

Cárdenas and Rojas Gómez call their approach “audiovisual anarchivism”, a practice of manipulating archival material freely and using fiction to unsettle the apparent authority of the historical record. The idea has been part of their work since The Sound of Crickets (2022), a 41-minute documentary made with Julián David Gutiérrez that investigated the disappearance of Cárdenas’ grandfather through archival records and digital databases. The End of Times extends that interest into the unpredictability of AI.

Cárdenas describes the Buga archive as a map of generational change. His father’s generation was politically committed. His own generation carried anger through metal and punk. The youngest generation lives with depression and psychiatric medication. The family therefore becomes a small social register, with private moods reflecting larger political conditions.

“In that archive, and in my particular experience, I felt that I could make visible differences between generations,” he says. “And I think that was the first intuition to approach the material. And we knew that this intimate narration could turn into a political narration as well.”

A still from ‘The End of Times’ | Photo Credit: Special Arrangement

The film’s political history becomes especially pointed when it reaches Colombia’s years of repression under President Julio César Turbay Ayala. His government introduced the 1978 National Security Statute, which expanded military powers and was used to target political opponents, students, unionists and activists. The film also invokes Operation Condor, placing the family’s story within the wider climate of military repression and political violence that spread across Latin America during the Cold War.

The film turns those histories into specific family stories. One of Salomé’s uncles was aboard Avianca Flight 203 when a bomb brought down the plane over Soacha in 1989, in an attack intended to kill presidential candidate César Gaviria. Salomé’s mother had been involved with revolutionaries before witnessing a choir friend have her tongue cut out during military detention, leading her to abandon that political life and devote her singing to the Lord of Miracles, before seeking political asylum in Canada. Elsewhere, the family archive even connects an uncle’s cancer diagnosis to Indira Gandhi’s assassination, with the biopsy results arriving on the day of Gandhi’s death. These memories accumulate around the New Year party. The archive keeps restarting, returning to the same images while Salomé’s narration changes what they mean.

“The work, through editing, but also through script writing, was trying to make those personal experiences turn into political and historical anecdotes,” Cárdenas says. “That’s why this film is full of references to not only Colombian history, but Latin American history.”