[2] The script, written by Colombia's Nobel Prize-winning author Gabriel García Márquez, had been shot twice before, first in 1965 by Mexican director, Arturo Ripstein and in 1982 also by Jorge Alí Triana as a TV series produced by RTI Producciones.

[4] Tiempo de morir was very well received and it is considered one of the best Colombian films of the 1980s with Condores no Entierran Todos los dias and Milagro en Roma.

[3] Juan Sayago, a soft-spoken middle age man, is released from prison after completing an eighteen-year sentence for the death of Raúl Moscote in a duel.

Tulio also warns Sayago that Pedro and his brother want to kill him and that it is better for him to leave the town, but Juan yearns to see Mariana, the woman he was in love with and he was going to marry when he was taken to jail.

Still mourning the death of her husband, who died a few years before, Mariana is happy to see Juan, but also recommends him to leave the town as his life is under constant threat.

Surrounded by impending danger, Juan starts to pick up the threads of his life and begins to rebuild his home, the dilapidated house abandoned since the death of his mother many years ago.

Convinced that his enemies will not kill him as long as he does not yield to their provocations, Juan endures, with incredible calmness, the insults and humiliations of Julián Moscote, the oldest of the two sons bent on revenge.

As they knit together in a veranda overlooking the river that crosses the town, Mariana tells Juan about the many letters that she wrote him, although he never received them.

Triana worked on the script's dialogues with the help of Eligio García Márquez (1947–2001), a brother of the Nobel Prize winner writer.

This television production had the same main cast of this film (Gustavo Angarita, María Eugenia Dávila, Sebastián Ospina and Jorge Emilio Salazar), and it was well received by critics.

García Márquez liked the miniseries, but lamented that it had been shot on video and offered Jorge Alí Triana to make it as a feature film.

The film retakes the story of the original script, but incorporates a new key scene written by García Márquez specially for this version.

One week before production started, the Nobel prize winner wrote the scene in which the prostitute reads Julian his fortune in the cards.

The film employed the same main cast of the miniseries, but added two notable Cuban actors in the roles of the major and Casildo.

Focine, the Colombian Institutional Company of Cinematography, gave 200,000 and el Instituto Cubano de Arte e Industria Cinematográficos, ICAIC, contributed 100,000 dollars.

[1] Four months after finishing principal photography of the film, Amero was completely destroyed by the eruption of the Nevado del Ruiz.