Two men meet in downtown Bogotá. One is Mañe, an older man missing a leg and the means to survive in a city that couldn't care less. The other is a "silletero", a man with a chair on his back, who carries people around for money. Their strange friendship slowly takes them to the exact place from which both tried to escape: their past. This Colombian movie originally titled "La Sombra del Caminante" is in black and white, and with its barebones production it looks at first like a student movie. But the absurdity, the dark humor and the mystery that drives the characters quickly win your attention. The end result is a movie that doesn't let you go.
The people inhabiting "Wandering Shadows" have no use for empathy and even less so solidarity. The landlord of the room which Mañe rents, a retired and often drunk army sergeant, yells at him for being late on his payments. "You are a cripple, go live in an asylum" he tells him. It's worth noting that the sergeant himself has a limp and he is walking with a cane.
A functioning government is also nowhere to be found. When Mañe comes to the labour exchange office to look for a job, he is told to pay 10,000 peso and not to worry. In return he gets a mock medical exam and a motivational speech in which the hopeful applicants are told to believe in themselves, and the job will come, as if unemployment is a mental, personal problem of the applicants rather than a structural failure that the government has to address. The government not only doesn't help, it interferes. When the man with the chair encounters policemen, they tell him he isn't allowed to work without a special permit.
