VIOLENCIA

POLITICAL THRILLER / DRAMA
Colombia | 100 min | Completed script | Financing
Original idea, screenplay and direction: María José Moreno
A fiction feature inspired by true events

LOGLINE
When the destruction of an illegal gold mine triggers a miners’ strike in Tarazá, Colombia, two sisters on their way to the coast become trapped in a roadside hotel besieged by looting and violence, while the teenage son of an assassinated union leader is drawn into the armed conflict.

DIRECTOR’S NOTE
Violence was born out of my experience of being trapped during a miners’ strike, a reality whose full dimension took me years to understand. From that moment on, I began a sustained investigation into illegal gold mining and its ties to the armed economies that run through Colombia.

The film approaches violence not as an isolated episode, but as a force that shapes territory, bodies, and everyday life. From this perspective, it follows how a miners’ strike transforms a town, its spaces, and its inhabitants into the landscape of a deeply broken normality.

SELECTED RECOGNITION

Lab Guion Colombia 2025
Preselected for Sundance Development Track
Selected Writer, Linterna Lab 2025
Third Place, Latinx Screenplay Competition 2025
Semi-Finalist, Flickers’ Rhode Island International Film Festival 2025

CONTACT
María José Moreno
Writer / Director
Piedra Lumbre Films, Colombia
contactmariajosemoreno@gmail.com

SYNOPSIS
The destruction of an illegal gold mine by the army triggers a miners’ strike that soon plunges the town into a spiral of violence. Jhon, a miners’ union leader, fights for his community’s survival, but is murdered before the uprising fully erupts. His teenage son, Yeison, shattered by the loss, is gradually pulled toward the armed structures that dominate the region.

Amelia and Martina become trapped, along with a group of truck drivers, in a roadside hotel on a blocked national highway. As cargo trucks pile up, the hotel turns into the epicenter of the strike, the looting, and the destruction, while the town sinks into a violence that ceases to be the exception and becomes the norm.