Film Screening: Rodrigo D: No Future
September 22, 2026 - 6:00 pm
Segal Theatre
The Graduate Center, CUNY
Film screening followed by a Q&A Session
A gritty and unflinching look at youth on the margins of 1980s Medellín, where crime, drugs, and dead ends define everyday life. Director Víctor Gaviria captures the aimlessness of young people trapped in a world that offers them little more than small drug deals, stolen cars, and borrowed time.
Gaviria deliberately avoids sensationalizing his subject. The most violent moments happen off screen, and the film lingers instead on the mundane texture of his characters’ lives: arguments with siblings, failed dreams, and the quiet crush of hopelessness. Rodrigo, a frustrated artist who wanders the streets listening to punk rock and longing for a drum set, becomes an unlikely but compelling symbol of a generation with nowhere to go.
What makes this film truly haunting is the story behind it. Six of the nine nonprofessional actors cast in major roles died before the film ever reached wide audiences, obscure victims of the very violence it portrays. A raw and sobering portrait of a city at war with itself.
Jerry W. Carlson (Ph.D., University of Chicago) is professor and a historian of narrative forms with special expertise in narrative theory, the history of the novel, global independent film, and the cinemas of the Americas. From 2013 to 2022 he served as Chair of the Department of Media & Communication Arts at The City College CUNY. In addition, at the CUNY Graduate Center he is a member of the doctoral faculties of French, Comparative Literature, and Film & Media Cultures and a Senior Fellow at the Bildner Center for Western Hemispheric Studies. He has lectured at Stanford, Columbia, Escuela Internacional de Cine y TV (Cuba), the University of Paris, and the University of Sao Paulo, among others. His current research is focused on how film and prose fiction from the Global South portray the histories and legacies of slavery, imperialism and colonialism. Moreover, he is an active producer, director, and writer with multiple Emmy Awards. As a Senior Producer for City University Television (CUNY-TV), he created the series City Cinematheque about film history, Canapé about French-American cultural relations, and Nueva York (in Spanish) about the Latino cultures of New York City. As an independent producer, his work includes the Showtime Networks production Dirt directed by Nancy Savoca and Looking for Palladin directed by Andrzej Krakowski. In 1998, he was inducted by France as a Chevalier de l’Ordre des Palmes Academiques.
Curator & Moderator: Jerry W. Carlson, Senior Fellow, The Bildner Center for Western Hemispheric Studies & Professor, The City College & Graduate Center, CUNY
TO REGISTER send email to bildner@gc.cuny.edu
