A woman spends her life building a science beside the man who becomes its father. At ninety-one, she learns who he was before she knew him.
Bogotá, early 1940s. Alicia Dussán is in her twenties, one of the first students of ethnology in Colombia — a discipline that barely exists. She meets Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff, an Austrian émigré eight years her senior: intelligent, cultivated, reserved, a man who rarely speaks about the life he left behind.
They marry.
Together they enter the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and begin working with the Kogi, a people who have deliberately withdrawn from the outside world and who regard the mountain as the heart of the world. Alicia and Gerardo document a world few outsiders have ever seen. Their research becomes foundational. Together they establish institutions, create university programmes and help build Colombian anthropology from the ground up.
But while he becomes the celebrated father of Colombian anthropology, she becomes the woman beside him.
For more than fifty years they work together. They publish together. They teach together. Their names become inseparable — even though the history of their discipline remembers one of them far more prominently than the other.
Gerardo dies in 1994. Alicia continues. She becomes one of Colombia’s most respected anthropologists and archaeologists, works well into old age, and survives the man with whom she shared her life, her fieldwork and much of her intellectual legacy by almost three decades.
Then, in July 2012, everything changes.
At a conference in Vienna celebrating Gerardo’s hundredth birthday, a former student takes the stage. He had intended to honour his teacher. Instead he presents documents showing that the man Alicia married had been a member of the Nazi Party and the SS before emigrating to Colombia.
Alicia is ninety-one. What she knew, and when she knew it, is the question the film turns on.
Because what does it mean to discover the truth about someone after half a century of believing you knew him? And what happens to a life’s work when the person whose name stands beside yours has a hidden past that changes the meaning of everything that came before?
ALICIA is not primarily the story of Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff. It is the story of Alicia Dussán — a pioneering woman whose own contribution to anthropology was repeatedly overshadowed by the man beside her, and who at ninety-one was forced to reconsider not only her husband but the history they had created together.
The film follows her across eight decades: from the young woman entering an almost nonexistent discipline, through the extraordinary fieldwork among the Kogi and the making of Colombian anthropology, to the revelation in Vienna and the eleven years she still had to live with what she had learned.
At its heart lie two questions. How well can we ever know another person — even the person with whom we have shared a life? And who owns a life’s work created by two people, when history remembers only one?
Alicia Dussán de Reichel was born on 16 October 1920 in Bogotá and died on 17 May 2023 at the age of 102. She was among the first students of ethnology in Colombia and for two decades the only woman in the country conducting archaeological and anthropological research. Her fieldwork took her to the Kogi in the Sierra Nevada de Santa Marta and to the Tukano in the north-western Amazon.
Gerardo Reichel-Dolmatoff was born on 6 March 1912 in Salzburg and emigrated to Colombia in 1939. The two married in the early nineteen-forties. In 1952 they jointly founded the Colombian Institute of Anthropology, in 1957 the first chair of anthropology in Latin America at the Universidad de Cartagena, and in 1963 the Department of Anthropology at the Universidad de los Andes in Bogotá. He died in 1994.
In July 2012, at the 54th International Congress of Americanists at the University of Vienna, the anthropologist Augusto Oyuela-Caycedo made public that Reichel-Dolmatoff had belonged to the Nazi party and to the SS. The basis was research by the historians Holger Stoecker and Sören Flachowsky of the Humboldt University in Berlin, specialists in the Nazi period. Oyuela-Caycedo had studied under Reichel-Dolmatoff and had prepared his paper as a tribute for the hundredth anniversary of his birth.
The film is about people who studied an indigenous people. It cannot do that without letting that people speak for themselves. In this material the Kogi are neither a location nor a backdrop but a counter-authority — and the rules by which they decide about contact with outsiders apply to a film production exactly as they apply to a research expedition.
Nor is this film a tribunal. What Reichel-Dolmatoff did is documented and is named as such. What he later became is documented too. The film does not pass judgement in place of the woman who had eighty years to do so herself.