“The End of Times”, interview with directors Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas

Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas discuss their film The End of Times, which premiered during 41st Critics Week at the Venice Film Festival 2026. The film explores complex themes through a blend of family footage, AI-generated scenes, and experimental audiovisual strategies. Their conversation sheds light on the innovative process behind this ambitious project, which challenges traditional notions of documentary and fiction.

The blending of memory and invention in The End of Times

The directors explain that their film navigates the delicate boundary between reality and imagination, emphasizing that the past is ultimately a construction shaped by the present. They aimed to create a visual and narrative approach that would keep viewers engaged without causing confusion. To achieve this, they spent over four years experimenting with different audiovisual techniques, balancing clarity with risk to evoke a double sensation—making the audience feel they are watching a documentary that is, in fact, a work of fiction. The process involved working with a vast amount of material, including 70 hours of family archives, which served as the foundation for constructing the characters and story.

The role of The End of Times in addressing cultural and political sadness

The film’s portrayal of maternal sadness is rooted in a fictional narrative, although it draws heavily from archival footage. The filmmakers clarify that the characters representing the mother, Salome, and other family members are created constructs based on recurring themes observed in the archives. They see sadness as a symptom of contemporary society, reflecting broader cultural and political issues. The directors emphasize that their approach was to explore these themes through a poetic lens, using fiction to highlight the universality of emotional struggles rather than offering a literal or documentary account.

The use of AI to explore history with irony and distance

A significant aspect of The End of Times involves the integration of AI-generated content, especially when depicting historical atrocities like dictatorships and colonialism. The filmmakers describe how they used AI to generate images that often carry an ironic tone, such as scenes of social inequality portrayed through surreal or exaggerated visuals. They highlight that AI served as a tool to reflect on the precariousness of the world, creating a visual radiography of contemporary issues. This approach allowed them to distance themselves from a purely dramatic treatment, instead offering a hallucinated, poetic perspective that invites viewers to reconsider the weight of political history.

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