Parenting & Family Quote by Barbet Schroeder

There is a careful, almost disarming modesty to Schroeder's phrasing: not a manifesto, not a claim to authority, just the insistence of attention. "I've been following" signals a stance that matters for a director whose work often circles violence, power, and moral ambiguity. He frames his interest as observation first, which reads like journalistic humility and also like an artist's alibi: I didn't invent this story; I watched it unfold.

Then comes the emotional hinge: "because it's the country of my childhood". Childhood is doing heavy lifting here. It’s not the legal language of nationality or the romantic language of roots; it’s memory, sensation, the formative landscape that wires a person's fear and loyalty. In a single clause, Colombia becomes less a headline and more a private archive. That shift is the subtext: his investment isn’t ideological tourism but something closer to haunted belonging.

The context around Schroeder sharpens the intent. As a Franco-Swiss director with a transnational career, he’s long been positioned as an outsider looking in. Invoking childhood complicates that position. He’s both witness and implicated, someone who can translate Colombia to global audiences while admitting the distortions that nostalgia and distance introduce. The line also gestures at responsibility: if the place that made you is burning, you don’t get to pretend you’re neutral.

It's a small sentence that quietly asserts a right to care, and a warning about the cost of caring from afar.