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DON CA

By Patricia AYALA

Documentary - Completed 2013

Mr Ca is a portrait of a rich and complex character. Not an easy man to be classified. Heir of the best and worst of Colombian society, he decided to transform his life in a literary manifesto in which happiness means whishing the least to have the most.

- Year of production
- 2013
- Genres
- Documentary
- Countries
- COLOMBIA
- Languages
- SPANISH, ENGLISH
- Duration
- 90 mn
- Director(s)
- Patricia AYALA
- Producer(s)
- Patricia AYALA RUIZ (Pathos Audiovisual SAS)
- Synopsis
- Mr. Ca’s family comes from illustrious and controversial characters: the first Colombian President, intellectuals seeking independence and slavers.
  Destined for success and glory, he ended up living amongst Afro communities along Colombia’s Pacific region fighting as best they can the scourge of violence and poverty. Mr. Ca educates the adolescents in town who follow his light like a beacon in the storm.
  Camilo Arroyo Arboleda has been a school teacher, a sailor, a taxidermist, a dog psychiatrist, a gold miner, a tree sawer, a dentist, a blaksmith, a pharmaceutic... For a while he even was black kids’s white monster. 40 years ago, kids would run in fear of his presence as they had never seen a white face before. So huge was their fear that moms began to bring over to him their kids with the hope that fear will erase their bad behavior.
  Mr. Ca, as he is affectionately known, a slavery descendant, ekes out a living from his many trades. He lives among poverty, his most precious valuables are his canoe and his scythe. He keeps on educating the kids he hosts for long periods of time at his place. Once every year he leaves his jungle wear to go back to his hometown to participate in the most important catholic event: the Holly Week. He’s now 60 years old and sometimes he asks himself whether he followed the right path in his life...
  It isn’t easy to label him: he is neither a colonist nor a Good Samaritan; neither a philosopher preaching the legend of the Noble Savage nor an anthropologist studying Afro communities; neither a crazy man nor a maladjusted hippie. He remains outside the box and off the path traditionally considered “correct”. He is a free, disobedient man of the modern world.
  Mr. Ca will be a portrait of an atypical character, an adventurer who seems out of place yet is where he is precisely because he wants to be there. His amazing stories will invite us to delve into the spiny – and seemingly impenetrable – subject of personal freedom. Freedom to choose a path different from the one modern society offers; the freedom still denied Afro-Colombian communities, no longer through the use of the whip, but through violence and poverty; and the illusory freedom of a nation that unreservedly surrenders to the captains of political and economic power.