Adieu Sauvage

Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento says that during his childhood his composed name showed his Amerindian origins and often earned him mockery.

Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento was born in Bogota on April 5, 1987, to a lawyer father and a mother who worked in a supermarket. Nothing predestined him for the cinema and yet, at the age of 19, he left his country for Europe and enrolled at the Fine Arts School in Poitiers with a student visa. It was during his studies that he got closer to cinema and successfully passed the entrance exam to the IAD film school in Belgium.

In 2018, his graduation film “Simon cries” was spotted on the festival circuit where it circulated extensively. It is the story of a heartbroken young man, who starts to cry his eyes out – literally. The film reveals the filmmaker’s endearing personality.

Between burlesque and sad clown, resignation and ferocity, Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento wants to highlight the feeling of sadness that is too often repressed by Latin American culture.

In “Farewell, savage”, his first feature-length documentary, Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento confronts the lovesickness of the Amerindian population of the Colombian Amazon. An ethical questioning of ethnological cinema intersects with a burlesque and sometimes pathetic personal quest, Sergio is now interested in the Man “who feels nothing”.

Sergio Guataquira Sarmiento currently lives in Brussels, awaiting regularization.