A Conversation with Architect Leandro Cortés Montaño
Lines of Power
A conversation with filmmaker, photographer, and architect Leandro Cortés Montaño on Muisca myth, magical realism, and watching a war on the other side of the world become a local argument.
There is a particular kind of vision that only belongs to people who have left and come back. Leandro Cortés Montaño left Cali when he was six years old, carried out by a family fleeing threats against his father's life. He returned decades later, an architect trained in the U.S., a filmmaker shaped by Barcelona, a photographer with an eye still calibrated to the city he was forced to leave, believing, as he puts it, that Colombia finally wanted peace.
Through his production house, Huitaca Films, named for the Muisca goddess who used art, dance, and rebellion to resist an oppressive god from the East, Leandro has spent his career doing something deceptively simple and enormously difficult: listening. His documentary work follows internally displaced communities living in housing built without their input. His experimental films draw the hidden geometries of Bogotá, tracing the lines Indigenous Muisca civilization once used to organize the world, lines later overwritten by colonization and modernity. His AI-assisted music video reimagines the myth of El Dorado as a queer love story across centuries. Across all of it runs the same conviction: that myth is never just myth. It is how people explain what is happening to them when no one else will listen.
That conviction feels newly urgent. Colombia's political center has lurched rightward, and a new government has moved quickly to align itself with Israel, a decision most Colombians never asked for and many did not expect. In Cali, a city with its own long, unfinished reckoning with war, displacement, and colonization, that shift has landed with surprising force. Palestinian flags fly at political rallies. Murals go up. And, as Leandro describes below, foreign soldiers have walked freely through the wreckage of a natural disaster while local residents were treated as suspects for the flags on their gear.
What follows is a conversation about what it means to watch a distant war become a local argument overnight, and about a filmmaker whose entire body of work has prepared him, more than most, to understand why.
In Brief
Leandro Cortés Montaño is a Colombian filmmaker, photographer, and architect from Cali and the founder of Huitaca Films. He left Colombia as a child political asylee, trained as an architect in the U.S., and now makes magical-realist films rooted in Muisca myth and displacement narratives.
"I am a Caleño who has had many homes"
Leandro was born in Cali, but his family left in 1999, when he was six. His father, an architect working a federal contract in Jamundí, received death threats by mail and by phone from guerrilla groups, the kind of threat that leaves a family no real choice. They fled to the United States and were granted political asylum. What came next was twenty-six years of movement: childhood in Kansas, stretches in Texas and Florida, an architecture degree from Syracuse University, nearly eight years practicing architecture in Philadelphia, a master's in film in Barcelona.
So in many ways, I am a Caleño that also has had many homes in his life. Leandro Cortés Montaño
He returned to Cali, drawn back by a belief that the country's peace process meant something had actually changed. The most recent election, he says, complicated that belief, proof, in his eyes, that there remain "forces and people who still want war," and that some of them profit from it.
It's against that backdrop, a returning exile, still recalibrating his sense of home, that the Middle East conversation arrived in Cali. Not gradually, but all at once.
On the Horizon
Architorture, Leandro's latest short film, premieres November 21st, 2026 on Huitaca Films' channel after a year on the festival circuit.
Watch · Huitaca Films
Eight Questions on War, Myth, and Space
Q.We know Cali has been living with its own version of conflict for decades. What's it like, emotionally, to now watch a war on the other side of the world start showing up in Colombian politics?
I think that what is happening in Palestine is affecting the entire world. Yet it was very surprising to see how this global conversation became local so quickly. In Cali, people have always supported Palestinian rights. You see murals advocating for Palestinian rights all over Cali. People were aware of what was happening in Palestine for a while. However, it was shocking to see how quickly things came to Cali, I mean how members of the IDF were freely walking around the rubble of buildings from the earthquake. In political rallies for progressive candidates, you see the Palestinian flag fly high. Let's not forget that many Colombians also have Arab roots, an estimated 3.2 million. As a result, many feel like it is a personal cause.
Colombians are also not foreign to genocide. Indigenous people, our ancestors as well, faced genocide, spiritual, physical, a genocide of our languages, for 300 years as a colony, then 200 years as a republic. Rural Afro-Colombian communities have faced violence over the usurpation of their land. Most recently, the political party of the UP faced genocide as well, for their progressive beliefs; many of them were targeted and killed. Colombians are not foreign to the use of violence to take away land and destroy resistance, unfortunately, coming from our own people, orders from those in power.
There's a division in how Palestine is talked about that mirrors a larger division in Cali: a general progressive attitude versus a more conservative one. Evangelical groups are more adamant about supporting Zionism here, seeing it as a necessity, in many ways like in the States. But Cali leans progressive. People on the right often don't understand why it should be of our concern. People on the left see it as a worldwide humanitarian issue with direct parallels to Colombia, and will remind those on the right that Israel has been involved in Colombian affairs before. It was Yair Klein, a former Israeli officer, who provided training and arms to far-right paramilitary groups in Colombia at the peak of the armed conflict, leading to the deaths and displacement of rural citizens, Afro-Colombian communities, Indigenous communities, and humanitarian and environmental groups.
Q.You trained as an architect before becoming a filmmaker. Does that background change how you read what's happening geopolitically right now, do you see it in terms of space, power, and lines the way you do with Bogotá and the Muisca?
Yes. I trained as an architect for five years at Syracuse, then practiced for almost eight years through different firms in the Philadelphia area. I also have a minor in geography with a focus on social geography. Space is power. Whoever gets to take up more space has more power, whether that's built space through a building, or the space a body takes up. Access to space dictates power too. Who can enter what building? Do they enter through the front door, the side door, the back door? It's all power.
This happens at every scale. What neighborhoods were knocked down to make space for highways? Why were so many Black neighborhoods sacrificed for "progress" that never came to them? At Syracuse we were taught to read context very carefully, a building has to adapt to a community's needs, but to know those needs, you have to get out there and talk to people. Architecture is a social profession. That's where social geography becomes so important.
One of the clearest ways we can see lines in Muisca culture is through textiles. Textiles were an important form of communication and language for Indigenous peoples across the Americas, much like the quipus of the Inca, used to count and organize a vast territory. The lines in Muisca textiles carried meaning tied to their cosmovision: rank, societal duty, beliefs about the world. It's important to note the Muisca still exist today, in rural and urban communities around Bogotá. Their textiles still live, and they're still fighting for water rights, for the protection of páramos. Taking up that space is empowering, and it puts their lives at risk.
Q.Violent Growth is about a community built without its own input. Do you see a parallel between that and how ordinary Colombians are being pulled into decisions about a distant war they had no say in?
Yes, absolutely. A federal and municipal government that wants to make decisions without the input of its people. Most Colombians do not want war, at home or abroad. Violent Growth highlights how minimally the government, at every level, involves itself in the well-being of its people, housing projects for internally displaced people that don't account for the fact that many residents have missing limbs from the civil war, and yet the homes are designed with staircases. These are concerns the government should understand, or at least try to. It's about listening, and that is something the government and its institutions have not done, historically or now.
Q.Has the current moment changed what you want to make right now?
I've always wanted to express my own condition, as well as the conditions of those who can't express theirs. My life has been shaped by being a political asylee in the United States. The civil conflict in Colombia and the failed U.S. war on drugs have always affected my life, so I'm naturally drawn to these topics. I've had the privilege of telling my own story when others haven't been able to tell theirs, so I tend to keep returning to these issues, and to understanding their source: racism, classism, evangelization, machismo, homophobia, transphobia, colorism, all products of colonialism from 500 years ago, and neocolonialism in the present. It's just been my life, and then a desire to understand why it happened to me, and why it happens to others. If anything, this political shift has only made it clearer that we need to keep talking about these issues. It has reaffirmed my desire to explore them.
Q.Huitaca Films is built around listening to silenced voices. In a moment this loud, how do you protect that intimacy?
You have to protect it by having respect. Not everyone wants to be online; not everyone wants their story told. In a moment when we're all so loud through social media, you have to take the time to ask people whether they want to be loud too. I know I often don't. Most of the time, I'm not loud myself, I'm an introvert from a loud culture. So it comes down to listening: who wants to speak intimately, and who wants to raise their voice. I focus on those who want to be loud, and honestly, loud people inspire me, because I'm not one of them. In turn, I try to protect that intimacy by respecting people's privacy.
Q.What draws you to using new technology to tell ancient stories, and has that relationship to tools changed as AI itself becomes part of the global conversation? What are you working on next?
Making the AI music video "Mi Dorado" took me a year, and in that year I watched AI evolve in real time. It began as an experiment to understand what AI was, but also to understand what I was going through emotionally. I had just come out of a difficult relationship, was in a moment of transition, and needed to express what I felt. I also wanted to express my frustration with the concept of "mestizaje" in Latin America, a process that was violent, white-supremacist, and Eurocentric, and that convinced a continent we were all equal because we mixed ethnically through marriage, unlike the U.S. and Canada, which segregated along Protestant, puritanical lines. At the end of the day, colonization is colonization. It was imposed either way.
AI was still being figured out at that time. I explored it, and I don't think I'll use it to make visuals again, I don't really recommend it, either. It's a more economical way for struggling filmmakers to make work, but it removes the artistry. Making "Mi Dorado" actually made me more resistant to using it for anything creative going forward.
Right now I'm working on a few short films and a photography project, tracing the connection between past and present and how we might build a new identity, a future, for what it means to be from Abya Yala. On the architecture side, I'm curious about translating ceramics into built space through vernacular construction. Time fascinates me. And my short film Architorture is finally coming to YouTube for free streaming after a year on the festival circuit, it premieres November 21st, 2026.
Q.What are your greatest inspirations and influences?
My greatest inspirations are my family. My father introduced me to space-making, he's an architect too. My mother introduced me to the beauty of textiles. They continue to inspire me with their truly spontaneous creativity; together they have thousands of stories to tell. Especially my father, if you talk to him, he'll tell you things about Cali, about his childhood, that I've come to realize are quite unique to him. From his stories I pieced together what narratives of space actually mean: the emotional meaning we give to the spaces we inhabit day to day, the emotional space we build through daily use.
Walking around Cali inspires me. Traveling to new places and learning their history fills me with joy. I'm inspired by the people fighting for their own rights and the rights of others, there are activists in Colombia truly putting their lives on the line, and I can't help but admire them.
And finally, the creative work of my friends, the books they write, the short films they make, the music they dance to and create, the art they craft. I'm lucky to be surrounded by so many talented people, and I'm always fascinated by how they see the world. Oh, and folk music from Latin America, with a cafecito to top it off. I'm currently learning Afro-Colombian percussion, which has been a lot of fun.
Keep up with Leandro & Huitaca Films
A Note
From Antakly Projects
I come to this conversation from two directions at once. I'm half Colombian, half Syrian, and this year, that felt less like two separate identities and more like one long, unbroken line.
On the second day of the earthquake disaster, while my mother's city was still counting its dead and digging through rubble, Colombia officially recognized Israeli sovereignty over the Golan Heights. Colombia is only the second UN member state to take that step, a sharp pivot in foreign policy under the newly inaugurated right-wing government of el "Tigre" de la Espriella. I don't believe in adding to a country's division in a moment of need. But it was shocking that the timing landed on Cali while it was still on its knees. I've watched dirty politics up close before, but there's something specific about watching soldiers (not rescuers) from a state actively carrying out genocide get welcomed with open arms into a disaster zone, and then watching them take selfies for what were, transparently, image-rehabilitation tours. That's shameful, plainly. I won't pretend otherwise, and I don't think anyone should have to.
But that's not where I want to leave this. What has also been true, at the same time, is how beautiful the response on the ground has been: the community pulling together, volunteers showing up for neighbors and strangers alike, the kind of solidarity that a disaster sometimes reveals in people when everything else fails them. That part deserves to be said plainly too, and without cynicism, because it's the part that actually rebuilds a city, and it's the part that will outlast this government.
Colombia will take a long time to heal from this earthquake. If you're able, please consider donating directly to organizations doing the recovery work on the ground:
