THE BELL TOWER

In a rural village nestled in the Colombian mountains, where everyone knows each other, and by 7 pm there's no noise left, something strange happens: Every November 3rd, at 3:13 am, the church bells ring by themselves for 13 minutes. There's no wind, no one is in the bell tower. The priest says it's "the mountain air." Everyone pretends it's normal.

This year, the woman who was supposed to ring the bells for the Day of the Dead mass, 78-year-old Doña Elvira, is found dead at the foot of the bell tower. In her hand, she clutches a rusty key that no one recognizes, and in her pocket, a recent Polaroid photo of herself... as a young woman, with four other young people whom no one in the village claims to know. On the back of the photo, it says: “The five of us. 1983. Do not open.”

 Lucía, Elvira's granddaughter, left the village for Medellín when she was 17 to study at university. She returns after a few years for her grandmother's funeral and gets trapped when a landslide closes the only road for five days. She has to sleep at her grandmother's house, where the wall clock stops every day at 3:13 a.m.

Lucía starts asking about the other four people in the photo, and everyone tells her the same thing: "Those people never lived here." But in the cemetery, there are four unmarked graves, marked only with the same date: November 3, 1983. And at the town hall, the page in the book where births from that year are recorded has been torn out.

Lucía discovers that her grandmother's key opens a drawer in a desk in the sacristy. Inside, she finds five cassette tapes they recorded when they were young.

 The contents of the tapes baffled her, for each one contained a sworn statement, a pact of silence regarding a dark secret. The friends were gathered in a secluded spot. They used to meet there frequently. But on one occasion, something unexpected happened. They all witnessed an accidental death when one of the group fatally wounded a stranger who approached them intending to rob them. The young man only wanted to scare him into leaving them alone, so he threatened him by showing him the revolver he was carrying. He pulled the trigger involuntarily and killed him. After the incident, they made a promise not to speak of the matter to anyone. Every November 3rd, they would go up to ring the bells to remind themselves of their oath.

This hidden secret seems to have been revealed now, after the death of all the members of that group of friends.  However, something that troubles Lucía, and that she may never know, is why, apparently, everyone died on November 3, 1983, except for her grandmother. Did she have something to do with it? It's a complete mystery that only Grandma Elvira could answer, a mystery she took to her grave, and which remained hanging in the breeze that stirs those bells, in the solitude of the early morning of November 3rd.