In 1984 the Cinemateca Distrital in Bogota initiated a project to recuperate Colombia's filmmaking history, beginning with the first silent feature, Maria (1921). In Search of Maria, then, tells of the search not for a woman but for a film. "This is an exercise in contemporary archeology, where filmmaking is used as an instrument to search for a movie which was made sixty years ago, and of which there is no copy," says co-director Luis Ospina. Interviews with Estela López de López, the star of Maria, as well as members of the crew and their descendants, are mixed with reenacted sequences, stills and other documents. What emerges is a picture of the quaintness and the genius of primitive filmmaking.