An important moment came in the Seventies. The positive and frustrated neorealist tendency of these years, represented by the Spaniard Jose Maria Arzuaga and the Colombian Julio Luzardo, provided the most important thematic and esthetic drive in the history of the national cinema--one which, however, brought forth no lasting fruit.
Arzuaga made his the project Raices de piedra, a story of the chircales (brick factories) of Bogota, whose images had an unusual and unknown force on the cinema of this country. The movie succumbed to technical limitations: it had to be dubbed in Spain by Spanish actors, had grave narrative irregularities and was mutilated by a censor who thought the movie distorted the country's image. In 1963, Arzuago made Pasado el meridiano, a movie of more internalized perspective, with the resonance of the European language of the French New Wave and Antonioni. The technical limitations, as before, impeded the formation of Arzuaga's complex and imaginative ideas.
