Medellin, too well know as the cartel’s city. An unbelievable level of violence. The suffering of the peasants chased off their lands, eaten away by war, overpopulation, unemployment. The first victims of this violence are the young children and the adolescents. Surviving is managed by trying to cling on to anything offering some semblance of peace: women (from families often reduced to their vestiges), school (bereft of means), the

church (omnipresent). In a school run by quite a surprising teacher, adolescents attempt, try to write in their “Notebooks” the stories of their violent lives, to establish something they can depend on for orientation. Millerdad and Sandra, Maria-Eugenia and Doralba, Juan-Carlos and Camilo tell about their mother’s kindness, the absence of fathers, the battle to survive, and above all, childhood and the will to live.