'The End of Times': Colombian Filmmakers Use AI Hallucinations to Reimagine Five Decades of Family History at Venice

Bibiana Rojas Gómez and Juan David Cárdenas premiere their 80-minute hybrid documentary 'The End of Times' in competition at the 41st Venice Critics' Week on September 9. The film weaves together five decades of family archival footage — drawn from Cárdenas' own relatives and his grandparents' house in Buga, Colombia — with fiction, animation, and AI to trace generational trauma across Colombia's overlapping histories of political violence, economic liberalisation, and colonial exploitation.

The filmmakers describe their method as "audiovisual anarchivism," deliberately manipulating archival material and deploying AI's unpredictability to destabilise the authority of the historical record. A fictional narrator named Salomé — inspired by Cárdenas' younger cousins — guides viewers through the footage, turning what begins as an intimate family portrait into a political excavation. The project extends an approach the pair first developed in their 2022 documentary 'The Sound of Crickets.'