The anguished son of Colombian drug lord Pablo Escobar has reached out to the victims of his murderous father in a compelling documentary being screened at the Sundance Film Festival.
Over the years, Sebastian Marroquin — formerly Juan Pablo Escobar — has rejected dozens of offers from Hollywood to help tell the story of his notorious late father, gunned down by police in 1993.
But Marroquin, who changed his name and relocated to Buenos Aires to start a new life, has finally spoken out in Sins of My Father, Nicolas Entel’s powerful entry to Sundance’s World Documentary Competition.
“A producer friend in Colombia suggested making a documentary about Pablo Escobar,” Argentine filmmaker Entel told reporters. “I was looking to do something new, from a different point of view and it was then that I had the idea of telling the story through Escobar’s only son. I spent six months trying to convince him to take part. He had already turned down more than 50 offers because most of them wanted to exploit the name Escobar and glamorize the life of a gangster.”
Juan Pablo Escobar was 16 when he decided — shortly after the bloody death of his father — to change his name and move to Argentina with his mother.
Now a 30-something architect, Marroquin appears in the film as a tormented soul, torn between feeling love for the man he once knew as his father and disgust at the horrific crimes he committed, which included ordering the murders of several thousand people according to some estimates.
If Marroquin appears calm, “it’s because he has lost the right to be angry,” Entel told reporters.
“If you play a dirty trick on me and I say, ‘I’m going to kill you,’ you know it’s a figure of speech,” Entel said. “If Sebastian says something like that then he knows that tomorrow the newspapers are going to say that the son of Pablo Escobar threatened to kill someone.”
Entel’s documentary follows Marroquin as he attempts to seek reconciliation with the children of Rodrigo Lara Bonilla, Colombia’s former justice minister, and Luis Carlos Galan, a presidential candidate, both of whom were murdered at the behest of Escobar.
The scene where Marroquin comes face to face with the children of his father’s victims is the documentary’s most powerful moment.
“For me, it was very important to concentrate on the children, on the new generation,” Entel said.
When Shanghai-based designer Guo Qingshan posted a vacation photo on Valentine’s Day and captioned it “Puppy Mountain,” it became a sensation in China and even created a tourist destination. Guo had gone on a hike while visiting his hometown of Yichang in central China’s Hubei Province late last month. When reviewing the photographs, he saw something he had not noticed before: A mountain shaped like a dog’s head rested on the ground next to the Yangtze River, its snout perched at the water’s edge. “It was so magical and cute. I was so excited and happy when I discovered it,” Guo said.
TURNAROUND: The Liberal Party had trailed the Conservatives by a wide margin, but that was before Trump threatened to make Canada the US’ 51st state Canada’s ruling Liberals, who a few weeks ago looked certain to lose an election this year, are mounting a major comeback amid the threat of US tariffs and are tied with their rival Conservatives, according to three new polls. An Ipsos survey released late on Tuesday showed that the left-leaning Liberals have 38 percent public support and the official opposition center-right Conservatives have 36 percent. The Liberals have overturned a 26-point deficit in six weeks, and run advertisements comparing the Conservative leader to Trump. The Conservative strategy had long been to attack unpopular Canadian Prime Minister Justin Trudeau, but last month he
Chinese authorities said they began live-fire exercises in the Gulf of Tonkin on Monday, only days after Vietnam announced a new line marking what it considers its territory in the body of water between the nations. The Chinese Maritime Safety Administration said the exercises would be focused on the Beibu Gulf area, closer to the Chinese side of the Gulf of Tonkin, and would run until tomorrow evening. It gave no further details, but the drills follow an announcement last week by Vietnam establishing a baseline used to calculate the width of its territorial waters in the Gulf of Tonkin. State-run Vietnam News
PROBE: Last week, Romanian prosecutors launched a criminal investigation against presidential candidate Calin Georgescu accusing him of supporting fascist groups Tens of thousands of protesters gathered in Romania’s capital on Saturday in the latest anti-government demonstration by far-right groups after a top court canceled a presidential election in the EU country last year. Protesters converged in front of the government building in Bucharest, waving Romania’s tricolor flags and chanting slogans such as “down with the government” and “thieves.” Many expressed support for Calin Georgescu, who emerged as the frontrunner in December’s canceled election, and demanded they be resumed from the second round. George Simion, the leader of the far-right Alliance for the Unity of Romanians (AUR), which organized the protest,
RSS