In 1998, I was asked to interview the director and main actress of a film called La vendedora de rosas, The Rose Seller, which had rightly been nominated for a Golden Palm award at the Cannes film festival. After about eight phone calls to various Colombian locations, I managed to track down director Victor Gaviria and actress Leidy Tabares to Bógota airport, where they were awaiting their flight. The film, about the miserably violent, glue-sniffing lives of street children in Pablo Escobar’s Medellín, is one of the most powerful, haunting and troubling things you’ll ever see, not least because the “actors” in it were all plucked from streets or institutions by Gaviria – a bold, dangerous, and morally questionable if artistically sound choice - to make the film. Loosely based on Hans Christian Anderson’s tale “The Little Match Girl”, La vendedora de rosas was thus a film that was not only saying something, but doing something. Leidy Tabares played Mónica, a young girl who sells roses to romancing couples in the streets and clubs to try and raise a few pesos. The line to Bógota kept breaking up, and Leidy, only 16 at the time, was not very forthcoming, but I remember her saying that she’d never left Medellín before, let alone been on an airplane.

For a month, she led the life of a movie star – limos, dinners, parties, microphones, flashes. I saw her at the San Sebástian Film Festival later that year. Then it was back to Colombia to try and carry on as an actress. She was able to, for a short while, but eventually she was forced to return to her old lifestyle as a rose seller on the streets of Medellín. She had a son by Ferney, who was shot dead in 2001. And now I see that Leidy Tabares is (or has been) in jail in Bello, accused, along with Edinson Castañeda, of having paid someone to murder a taxi driver, Óscar Galvis. Leidy claims to have had neither the money nor the motive to do so. The fates of other participants in La vendedora de rosas have been no less bleak: one of them, John Fredy Ríos, is in a wheelchair; another, Giovanni Quiroz (who played the psychotic El Zarco in the film), is dead, and several more have also lost their lives. There’s so much you could say about all of this, about poverty, about blighted lives, about the morality of film-making. Leidy Tabares turns 21 this month, and the story of the rose seller has, over time, become something of an obsession with me. A part of her diary appeared in El Espectador in February. More of this, probably, in the future.
--------