Two films about, and shot in, Colombia just a few days apart: The First Night, a well-made, naturalistic, depressing picture of exploitation, war and poverty in isolated Andean hamlets and the national capital; the second, Emerald Cowboy/Esmeraldero, a pseudo-semi-documentary concerning the amazing career of a Japanese-American and the first U.S. production filmed in that capital in over a quarter-century. It's also the only movie ever to enter mines of the country's fabled emerald district.

In the 1970s, after several years in California and also globetrotting, Japanese-born Eishy Hayata landed in Colombia while in his twenties, attracted by the scandalously rough-and-tumble emerald trade. Largely through flashback from the brief "present" of August 2002, when the bodyguarded, older but spry CEO of Colombia Emerald Center begins to reminisce, the film follows chronologically, through numerous marked, separate stages of his life. At two hours less three minutes, it is too long, and some of these stages ought to have been summarized, abbreviated or simply cut.

Hayata wrote the screenplay from his Emerald Cowboy, a 1986 literary sensation in Japan, and served as executive producer as well as co-director with Andrew Molina. Along with handheld shooting and a variety of Kodak stocks, techniques such as pushing or pulling/flattening and changes in bleaching were employed to give that grainy, skewered-contrast look of documentary.

Additionally, local non-professionals were used for many of the over one-hundred speaking parts, set in eighty different actual locations. Separate narration had to be written up for the initial period in Chacaro and similar mountain towns that attracted his adventurous spirit through their resemblance to the 1800s Wild West. Innocent Hayata is schooled by beautiful no-nonsense Susana, who unwillingly returns to Venezuela but would have suited him better than Aurelia, his eventual wife who insists on a safer family life in Los Angeles.

Despite an excess of segments depicted, some too long, others not clearly explained, this independent film does display its subject's single-minded pursuit of his goal -- long-distance, Aurelia imagines other women, but his passionate mistress is the emerald and the cowboys who work it -- and also introduces a fascinating, rumored but little-known world of corruption, paramilitary forces and mercenaries, troops and fake soldiers, guerrilla bands of rival persuasions like warring ELN and FARC, cartels not only of drugs but also of gasoline and copper, outright banditry, racism and xenophobia, and political hooliganism. A world of sudden violence and death, whose gunfights are brief, unchoreographed, chaotic, unspectacular, deadly; and of La Guerra Verde, Green War, for control of lush mountains and gems of that color, which claimed 50,000 lives in a decade at the end of the Twentieth Century.

Given the author/subject's participation in financing and directing, temptation is strong to question full accuracy here, even if the manipulatory self-servingness of both hypocritical government and labor unions did not ring so primitively true. But the clincher is a written end-note, after a view of the helicopter ferrying him and that perpetual armed bodyguard across a now familiar mountain spike: wounded in a subsequent shoot-out, Eishy Hayata has been comatose in critical condition for months.

Borne out though merely hinted in some scenes -- i.e., a mountain gunbattle-chase in 4WD jeeps rather than on horseback, along winding sheer-drop dirt roads -- the difficult, near catastrophic filming itself is a whole 'nother story. If ever recorded, like Burden of Dreams and Hearts of Darkness: A Filmmaker's Apocalypse, that tale might turn out more fascinating than this film whose making it would document.

Since Spain's cutthroats first brutalized Boyacá five hundred years ago, this inhospitable land has witnessed natural as well as man-made disaster. Of an initial film caravan of fifty who enter in March 2001, the last eight came out in two remaining jeeps fourteen weeks afterwards. Aside from the above-mentioned official and unofficial combatants, they had endured kidnappers, warring mine owners with private armies, dangerous roads, land- and rockslides, avalanches, impenetrable jungle, tropical heat, outsize hailstones and torrential days-long squalls, vehicle breakdowns and accidents, mine cave-ins and seepage and inadequate ventilation.

Although the non-fiction movie that Molina and crew have made is good, the documentary that remains to be made should be better.

(Released by Indican Pictures; not rated by MPAA.)