Can you imagine how much nostalgia must weigh on the heart for dreams to turn into nightmares?

My name is Hanz Rippe Gabriel. I’m a Colombian filmmaker and the Co-Director of The Shadow of Yolüja—my first feature documentary. I’m honored to be part of the Early Production Lab at UnionDocs this summer in New York.

For nearly a decade, I’ve worked alongside the Wayuu, the largest Indigenous community in Colombia, who live in the desert along the Caribbean coast.

For them, few things are as important as dreams. Instead of saying “good morning,” they say: “What did you dream last night?”

Seven years ago, I dreamt I was in this very desert, taking photographs of the Wayuu. That dream led me on a journey where I met the Pushaina family of fishermen—and that gave birth to this film.

A black scar cuts across the Wayúu territory. A 150 km railway transports coal from the mine to the port, and from there to Europe. On the land where the port stands today, the Pushaina family was displaced 40 years ago by the mining company El Cerrejón, recently acquired by the Swiss multinational Glencore. Since the arrival of the train, coal dust has covered their bodies and entered their lungs. It has turned their dreams into nightmares.

Blending observational cinema with hand-crafted animation made from coal itself, The Shadow of Yolüja visually merges reality and dreams to explore the invisible trauma of environmental violence, forced displacement, and spiritual loss.

Telling this story is urgent. The community has filed a lawsuit against the mining company and is seeking justice. Our mission is to tell the other side of the “progress” story we’ve been told. While Colombian coal powers homes and industries in Europe, those communities neighbors of the company still live in darkness.

Not long ago, a Wayúu friend asked me: “Who is your community?” With that question in my mind soon I realised that my community is the filmmaking family.

That’s why I’m inviting you to be part of it—to join this campaign and, together, help us bring this film to life.

We are raising funds to make our participation in the UnionDocs Early Production Lab possible. With your support, we can cover the program fee, my living expenses during the residency, and airfare to the United States.

The UnionDocs Early Production Lab will play a crucial role in shaping the film’s creative vision and impact strategy. The mentorship and network it provides will help me build strong international partnerships, secure vital funding, and ensure that the film reaches both global audiences and the Wayuu communities it represents—amplifying their voices and shedding light on the mental health impacts they endure in the name of so-called “progress”.

And you, what did you dream last night?

Hanz Rippe is a Colombian director, producer, and cinematographer based in Bogotá. As a partner at Páramo Films, he collaborates on social, cultural, political, and environmental documentaries, focusing on remote communities in Colombia and Latin America. His work is marked by a strong aesthetic exploration tailored to each story’s unique universe. His films, Unless We Dance and Páramo, La Siembra del Agua, have won awards at festivals like Oberhausen, Bogoshorts, and São Paulo Curta Kinoforum.

About the Summer Documentary Labs:

The UnionDocs Summer Documentary Lab are a program for a select group of media artists from the US and abroad. Based in one of NYC’s most exciting neighborhoods, Ridgewood, Queens, the Summer Labs offer a platform for participants to spend the Summer making strides and clarify the creative direction of their projects to attract the potential team members, funders and producers they need to find their way to the finish. An intensive schedule of screenings, open seminar discussions, weekly industry “field trips,” and inspiring artist visits from some of the most dynamic voices across the field of documentary, the SUMMER DOCUMENTARY LABS are tightly structured environments that bring participants into a select group of emerging filmmakers to get challenged and encouraged to think through every aspect of their works-in-progress.

Drawing inspiration from across disciplines, this intensive program should not be mistaken for an industrial, journalistic, or traditional documentary training. Scholar Scott MacDonald highlighted in The New York Times that, “UnionDocs has a healthy sense that the older definitions of what constitutes ‘experimental’ cinema and what constitutes ‘documentary’ are up for grabs.” Much emphasis is placed on workshopping lab participants’ writing about their projects as a way to both clarify the creative direction and attract potential team members, funders and producers. Participants receive focused, honest and helpful feedback on their project proposals from prominent documentary artists and industry experts.

The Early Production Lab in July is for projects about to go into production. Filmmakers have already likely shot some of their material and have access to their subjects and are looking for ways to strengthen their media samples, and pitches and work through the ideas as they approach the production stage and plan for the entire process all the way through to distribution.