Ten years ago, in Impression of a War, Camilo Restrepo explored how the war that has been tearing his native Colombia apart for decades has left traces that constitute a visual memory. With Room of Shadows, he invents an allegorical device that broadens and universalizes this reflection, drawing on examples from the entire history of representations of war and violence. At the center of the allegory stands a woman, alone in her home during wartime. She has no name, no identity of her own, like the war, from which we only hear the racket outside. Who is this woman? As she says at the beginning of the film, she is the first person to not only draw a portrait, but most importantly to memorize an image: the shadow cast on a wall by her lover before he went off to war – Pliny the Elder reread by Restrepo. Let’s imagine that this woman has since memorized all representations of war. That, in her besieged room, certain images come back to her like shadows. When she isn’t focusing on the war threatening to destroy her home, she begins to describe and interpret these images: a painting by Paul Klee, a film by Travis Wilkerson, a photo by Susan Meiselas, etc. Her words project the representations into the viewer’s brain, which in turn becomes a room of shadows and a theatre of thought. At the heart of the film, the description of Brecht’s Kriegsfibel, a.k.a. War Primer, confirms the Brechtian nature of the project: far more than an imaginary museum, Room of Shadows is a prototype of an educational machine, a war machine against the illusions that distort our relationship to representations, against all forms of manipulation of the relationship between image and reality. A camera lucida meant to enlighten us. Cyril Neyrat