‘The End of Times’: Colombian filmmakers Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas use AI hallucinations to imagine life beyond capitalism
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.”
The film traces this shift through the changing shape of its family archive, moving from square-format camcorder footage to vertical phone videos. Salomé uses that change to question how technology has altered the way memories are recorded, searched and experienced across generations.
“We are full of images, but it’s impossible for us to imagine,” Cárdenas says. “And I think it’s not new. The image has been changing its social value from the very beginning of history.”
Rojas Gómez, who co-directs and edits the film, says their different backgrounds shaped the way they approached the archive. Cárdenas, a philosopher, brought the film’s philosophical and historical ideas, while Rojas Gómez drew on her experience as an experimental animator and editor to translate those ideas into images. “He had in his mind this philosophy and historical approach,” she says. “I tried to convert these things that are maybe heavier to put in a cinema, and translate that to images and experiment in different kinds of ways in the editing.”
The film later turns to AI image recognition, with the software absurdly identifying one family member as a cat and another as a bed. From there, Salomé follows the labour behind these systems, where workers in countries such as Kenya and the Philippines tag images so that machines can learn to recognise them. Her search for the source of her mother’s sadness therefore leads into a much larger economy of outsourced labour and exhaustion. “I searched for the source of your sadness, but I bumped into an economy of misery,” she says. “Your sorrow is many sorrows.”
A still from ‘The End of Times’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
Rojas Gómez and Cárdenas also use generative tools to invent footage that could never have existed, placing figures such as Margaret Thatcher, Kurt Cobain, Francis Fukuyama and Henry Kissinger inside the family’s New Year celebrations. In one especially funny sequence, Thatcher is imagined making manjarblanco with Salomé’s mother.
Rojas Gómez cites the photographer Joan Fontcuberta’s interest in photography as construction, along with filmmaker Harun Farocki’s interrogation of images and Alan Berliner’s use of humour within autobiographical filmmaking. She describes the AI process as an attempt to “hallucinate the archive”. “We take this idea to also think about how we can expand memory,” she says. “They can help us to visualise these things that might be with the archive we don’t have.”
The film’s formative political question comes from Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism, the 2009 book that popularised the argument that imagining the end of capitalism has become harder than imagining the end of the world. Fisher connected that sense of political impossibility to culture, work, education and mental health.
For Rojas Gómez, the sentence was present from the beginning of the project. For Cárdenas, the filmmaking process eventually demanded an increasingly absurd response to the problem.
“We needed to become so absurd, so anarchist, to try to break what was evident for everybody, that it’s not possible to construct another world,” he says. “So maybe this kind of craziness was the way we tried to find an alternative world that in the end is pure fantasy.”
A still from ‘The End of Times’
| Photo Credit:
Special Arrangement
That logic explains the film’s final movement. An earlier cut ended with footage of a real disaster in Buga, pushing the film toward the familiar grammar of apocalypse. The directors abandoned it after two years of working with the material. The final version turns toward children, games and AI-generated possibilities.
“We are trying to break with the apocalyptic mood of current times,” Cárdenas says. “And a baby is a promise of the future, even if it doesn’t happen.” “This project is an initiative to politicize mental illness,” they have said in an earlier interview with Variety.
The End of Times emerged through Visions du Réel’s 2025 Rough Cut Lab before reaching Venice, where Zagreb-based sales company Split Screen secured its international rights ahead of the premiere. It plays in competition at the 41st Venice International Critics’ Week alongside six other debut features from Colombia, Tunisia, Brazil, India, the UK, France, Italy and China.