在这部沉默之火纪录片片中,一个导演正在制作一部关于“沉默之火”的电影，可是他的母亲突然得上了一种罕见的缄默症，从此不能讲话。导演只好停下手头的摄制，开始记录母亲每天的生活，试图理解母亲身上到底发生了什么。他决定重溯家人的过去，并发现了母亲拍摄的一部儿童剧的片段。在这个片段里，年幼的导演扮演了假的游击队员，被武装力量抓获。这个发现让他想起自己的电影，而且惊觉哥伦比亚电影的起源和一个被媒体称为“误判”的历史事件之间的种种联系，“误判”指的是哥伦比亚历史上一个惨无人道的杀戮事件——军队杀害了许多无辜的年轻人，然后把他们打扮成游击队员的形象，来营造军队在武装冲突中获胜的假象。
While a director makes a film about this the origins of Cinema in Colombia, suddenly, his mother, apparently suffers a strange mental disease: without explanation she stops talking. This situation forces him to stop his film and starts recording his mother's everyday activity, trying to understand what possibly is happening to her. The director decides to revisit his family's past and finds a video footage of a children's theater play, shot by his mother, in which he himself acts as a false guerrilla fighter. This discovery brings him back to his original film and leads him to find the relationship that exists between the origins of Colombian cinema and what the media called "falsos positivos" a painful recent even in which it was found out that the army killed innocent youngsters and dressed then up as guerrilla fighters to give the impression they were winning the armed conflict.
