Medellin-born filmmaker and musician Santiago Giraldo Arboleda has spent the past five years building an unusual double career in London — directing commercials for the NHS by day and releasing genre-blurring music under his solo project Enla Arboleda. His story doubles as a portrait of two cities and how art travels between them.

His breakthrough came with La Mirada Desnuda (2020), a documentary short that premiered at the Cartagena International Film Festival and won Best Documentary Short at the Festival de Cine de Jardin. The film revisits Medellin's violent 1990s through filmmaker Javier Mejia, whose own movie Apocalipsur captured that era. For Giraldo, it was personal: he lost two uncles to the violence, and the project became a way to ask questions his family had long avoided.

Since then he has shifted toward fiction. Zoe (2024) imagines a city where AI manages social connections, while Blue Buttercream (2026) follows a young woman with chronic pain as illness reshapes her relationships and sense of self. A common thread runs through it all — vulnerability, identity, and how people talk about what's hard to say.

The music side is just as rooted in Colombia. Giraldo started guitar and painting lessons at seven, studied traditional rhythms like bambuco and cumbia at Medellin's Escuela Popular de Arte, and even spent two years playing in Ekhymosis, the rock band Juanes left in the late 1990s. His own releases — Trayectos Invisibles (2020), the EP Other Ways to Find Yourself (2024) and the single Keep You Close (2025) — mix alternative pop, jazz and electronics, with lyrics increasingly written in English about migration and life in the UK. A 12-track album is in the works. London has also given him stages he never expected: The Troubadour, SXSW London in June 2026, and the South Bank.

Why does this matter to travellers? Because it's a reminder that Medellin's creative scene runs far deeper than the city's well-worn narrative — and that London's Latin American corners, especially in the south of the city, are worth seeking out for live music and cultural crossover. Giraldo himself notes the community of Bolivians, Argentines and Chileans he's found in South London, each conversation sharpening his sense of what makes Colombian culture distinct. If you're heading to either city, his work is a good entry point into both.