self-hate, fear, and vengeance
by Douglas
Messerli
Andrés Gómez Tovar
and Boris Abaunza (screenplay) Andrés Gómez Tovar (director) Una Semana
(By the End of the Week) / 2019 [12 minutes] End of the Week
This
is a truly horrifying short film in which the central figure Fernando (Juan
Manuel Orestegui) meets up secretly in a garage with an assassin, Juan Manuel
Orestegui (simply titled the passenger) explaining that his wife has found new
love with a younger man and that wants the man in a pink sweater (Carlos
Carvajal) killed, explaining that they meet in a hotel almost every Tuesday
night, and that the job should be done by the end of the week.
The would-be assassin, although he needs
the money, still tries to talk with Fernando about changing his mind,
particularly after recognizing in the photograph a man who he describes as a
fag; I mean would you or I wear a pink sweater, he asks Fernnado. She must have
met him the gym teaching some sissy exercise maneuver, he argues. Is Fernando sure
that he wants the man killed: mightn’t he just rough him up a little with a
warning or even just drive him out town?
And there is the matter of having to forgive
his wife. The hitman argues that he must first learn how to forgive her. He
explains is own situation where he had begun playing less and less attending,
boozing and whoring around, to the woman he truly loved. And the real problem
was he couldn’t forgive her, that the idea that she had been with another man
begin to eat into him with such an intensity that he ended up killing both he
man and his lover.
Fernando pays him half the promised
money, and sends him on his way, nonetheless, before he drives off.
Soon after we see him in the hotel room
with the man in the pink sweater, and quickly realize that it is Fernando, not
his wife who is having the affair. His gay lover is attempting to convince him
that he needs to tell his wife, but Fernando clearly does not know have the
courage nor can find the way to do that, although he lies about having seen his
lawyer and will try to take care of the situation by the end of the week. Of
course. what he plans is to destroy evidence of his own transgressions and
remove the source of his own temptation, as if that might make his own desires disappear.
The one he cannot forgive is himself and his own unresolved sexual desires.
This
all appears in the context of a news report early in the film about general war
and vengeance throughout the world, suggesting that it is only when countries truly
want peace and sit down with the other to give up some of their power and
embrace the other side that they can truly prosper and survive as a successful
country.
But war-like behavior starts small, with
the inability to except oneself, and festers until it discovers, as promised,
that it must destroy everyone else around it. Mightn’t Fernando also now want
to destroy the far too chatty hitman and then perhaps his wife when he
discovers a new attraction to a gay man? There is no end to self-hate, fear,
and vengeance as this Columbian parable by Gómez Tovar reveals.
Dates of this production vary wildly, IMDb
suggesting it was released in 2017, while Letterboxd insists it appeared in
2020. It was first shown in an international festival in Odense in 2019, the
date of I have chosen, although it may have played in Columbia earlier, but
since the film’s copyright reads 2018, it probably wasn’t before that date.
Los
Angeles, August 14, 2026
Reprinted
from My Queer Cinema blog (August 2026).
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