Abstract

Medellín has been a privileged subject in Colombian cinema. In films whose stories take place in Medellín and movies' plots that revolve around the production of Medellín’s space, themes like social exclusion and violence become representational elements associated to marginality and segregation, as well as to struggles over the control of the urban territory and its correlates expressed on female and male bodies. By drawing on emotional geography, this article examines these films to explain how Medellín is constructed visually and discursively to elaborate stories based on segregation, exclusion along race and class, and the armed conflict that Colombia has experienced in its recent history, a conflict of which Medellín has been a battleground. Additionally, it becomes clear that social conflict in Medellín is a multi-scalar process. The ways in which political and social tensions have been experienced in the city—and their correlates in the production of urban spaces—are fundamentally shaped by the nature and structure of the urban territories where conflict materializes. In visual narratives, stories unfold at these multiple sites of urban conflict. These topics are representations built on dichotomies like inclusion/exclusion, center/periphery, and masculine/feminine, depicting Medellín as an ill city, an urban collection of geographies that suffer from an illness of which drug trafficking is its main cause and violence its main symptom.