DIEGO BOLIVAR
Diego Bolívar is a Colombian multidisciplinary artist and filmmaker based in Chicago. His work moves between cinema, painting, photography and writing, exploring memory, identity, migration, time and the human experience.
His approach is rooted in observation and experimentation, searching for meaning in everyday gestures, silences and moments that often go unnoticed.
His work has been recognized with multiple Emmy Awards for his contributions to television and visual storytelling.
Dressed as an astronaut, Antonio—a Latino man in Chicago—wanders through a city he longs to belong to, yet never fully can. He performs an identity that isn’t his, embodying a character he barely understands. As days pass, his sense of self begins to drift. Haunted by a past love and unable to define his desires, he remains suspended between who he is and who he wishes to become. Alone and displaced, Antonio searches for a future he cannot imagine. An absurd reflection on belonging and the immigrant experience in the United States.
On an ordinary morning, a Colombian father takes his daughter to school in Chicago. What begins as part of their daily routine suddenly changes when they are detained along the way. Inspired by real events and told in a single continuous shot, Un día cualquiera observes how, in a matter of minutes, normal life can turn into uncertainty, fear, and separation.
During the pandemic, a couple is confined to an apartment while the outside world seems to come to a halt. As the days pass, the intimacy of confinement reveals the distance that has grown between them. Exile explores loneliness, isolation, and the strange moment when two people discover they can feel exiled even while they are together.
With her suitcase packed and a ticket back to Colombia in hand, Silvia leaves her apartment and begins her journey to the airport. But just before the final leg of the trip, she stops. Unable to board the bus that would take her away from Chicago, she makes an impulsive decision to stay. What Silvia doesn’t know is that staying may be far more difficult than leaving.
Antonio, a Colombian living in Buenos Aires, has traveled far from home hoping to leave behind a past shaped by violence. At a party, he meets a Colombian woman carrying a past strangely connected to his own. Their encounter brings back what both have spent years trying to escape: a war that continues to follow them, even thousands of miles from home. La Distancia is a story about exile, memory, and the things distance cannot leave behind.
As a painter,
his work explores the human figure through abstraction, memory, and emotion.
His artistic journey began at the School of Fine Arts in Colombia, followed by exhibitions in Argentina and further training at the School of the Art Institute of Chicago.
Working primarily with oil paint and charcoal, he creates fragmented, abstract figures that move between presence and disappearance, exploring identity, vulnerability, and the inner human experience.
