Time & Perspective Quote by Barbet Schroeder

“Hallucinatory” lands as both punchline and diagnosis: Schroeder isn’t describing an occasional surreal incident, he’s framing a whole national atmosphere as a standing altered state. Coming from a director, the word choice matters. It’s cinematic shorthand, a way of telling you the country doesn’t merely contain dramatic events; it edits reality like a film that keeps slipping a frame. “All the time” does the heavy lifting, turning astonishment into routine. The kicker - “did I just see that?” - is the viewer’s line, not the philosopher’s. He’s capturing the reflex of someone whose senses have been trained to doubt their own footage.

The subtext is double-edged. On one side, it nods to the Colombia popularized abroad: magical realism, the lush and the uncanny, a place where the bizarre feels plausible. On the other, it hints at the harder sources of unreality: political violence, sudden shifts in order, the way extreme inequality and corruption can make daily scenes feel staged, arbitrary, unaccountable. That’s why the line works: it keeps the romance of “magical” while letting the dread seep in underneath.

Contextually, Schroeder’s outsider status is part of the charge. The quote can read as admiration for Colombia’s intensity, but also as a foreign gaze that risks packaging complexity as spectacle. That tension is exactly what makes it revealing: it’s less a travel anecdote than a confession about perception - how a place can overwhelm your narrative instincts until disbelief becomes your default mode of attention.