raíz (d. franco garcia becerra, w. annemarie gunkel, alicia quispe)

Raíz is an effective piece of filmmaking, which manages to blend the sentimentality of the story of a football-obsessed child who lives as a llama shepherd in the highlands of Peru, with a dash of the Sanjines, as the film tackles the impact of global capitalism on this obscure, and beautiful part of the world. Feliciano is, as his name suggests, a happy-go-lucky child who roams the mountains with his flock, and has particular affection for one llama which he has christened Ronaldo. At the same time, the mining industry is looking to drive the villagers and homesteaders out of the area. Feliciano’s parents are dragged into a conflict the child can only really understand when his flock and Ronaldo go missing, the result of an attack on the villagers by goons hired by the mining company. Set against the backdrop of Peru’s quest to go to the 2018 World Cup in Russia, the film adroitly weaves these twin strands together, and the overall impact is aided by the stunning scenery, immaculately captured by DOP, Johan Carrasco. 

la bronca (w&d daniel & diego vega)

A Peruvian film set in Canada in the early eighties. A fierce Canadian winter, where Roberto, recently arrived, gets dragged into his father’s macho snowy landscape, with predictably violent results. The closing credits make it clear that Roberto’s story runs parallel to events in Lima, where the Sendero Luminoso uprising is threatening to bring society to its knees. However, Lima, except for one call Roberto has with his mother, remains firmly off-screen. Instead the drama plays itself out as these immigrants, trapped in a self-regarding circle, edge their way towards tragedy, with Roberto’s frustrated adolescent energy proving the catalyst. The film profits from a suitably offbeat edit, the story gradually playing itself out with many details remaining unclear. Who exactly is Toño, the red-headed friend of Roberto’s father, Bob, who lives downstairs? How did Bob and his Canadian wife, who claims to be a journalist but shows no real sign of doing any journalism, actually meet? Bob is at the heart of the tale, a character straight out of Dylan’s Poor Immigrant, desperate to fit in and please and always destined to be on the outside. La Bronca, is a well-crafted domestic drama, but if you’re Peruvian one suspects there’s a whole other, darker level at work. 

magallanes (w&d salvador del solar)

Magallanes is not the tale of the trans-oceanic explorer. Instead, it’s the name of the film’s protagonist, a Peruvian ex-soldier, who took part in the military’s cruel campaign against the Sendero Luminoso in the province of Ayacucho. Now in late middle-age, Magallanes lives in Lima. He makes a part-time living driving a taxi and is paid to look after his senile ex-colonel by the colonel’s son, a wealthy businessman. Magallanes, desperate to earn a few bob, decides to blackmail the son by revealing the uncensored details of his father’s activities in Ayacucho. 

The idea for the blackmail comes when he picks up a woman inches taxi, Celina, who the colonel took as his concubine when she was 14 years old. Celina has since moved to Lima and is struggling to pay off her debts and make a go of her failing hairdressing business. As Magallanes becomes more and more caught up in Celina’s story, what begun as a mercenary exercise turns into an attempt to assuage his own guilt for his role in Celina’s unhappy past. When the blackmail attempt fails, Magallanes turns to kidnap. However, his real objective is to try to deal with the guilt of what occurred in Ayacucho, a name that lingers over the whole film like a curse.

Peru, it is said, is divided into four zones: the city (Lima); the jungle, the coast and the altiplano, the highlands. These zones are not only different geographically, but also politically. The Sendero Luminoso guerrilla movement emerged from the Altiplano, the land of the Incas. The state of Ayacucho was its heartland, a harsh, mountainous land. In essence, Ayacucho became a kind of Peruvian Vietnam, a place where the gloves were off and any kind of military strategy, including rape and torture, was used in the name of the war against terror. At one point in the film, Magallanes’ old service comrade, Milton, talks about how he misses the fear and the excitement of war. It could almost be Walken in the Deer Hunter. Magallanes himself knows he contributed to the committal of war crimes, but he also knows that society has rewarded the victors, such as the Colonel and his son, with his infinity pool and fancy cars. 

The film does its best to bring these injustices to light. There’s something slightly methodical about the plot and the pacing: at times it feels as though this is as much a carefully framed political treatise as a cinematic narrative. Which raises the issue of the problems inherent in political film-making. How the intentions underpinning the script so often cauterise its cinematic potency. There’s a clarity to the narrative which at times feels almost counter-productive. Drama depends on shades of grey, not blacks and whites. Having said which, Magallanes emerges as a solid piece of storytelling, which affords a lucid reading of the complexities of recent Peruvian history, delineating the price that has been paid by the victims of the military’s excesses as well as the grunt soldiers who had to carry out the military’s orders. 

jacob the mutant [mario bellatin]

Jacob the Mutant is a genuinely strange exercise in writing. Bellatin presents the extracts of a lost novel written by Joseph Roth. These fragments are stitched together to tell a weird, cabalistic tale. Jacob lived in a border town on the edge of the Austro-Hungarian empire. He has a zoo. He helps people to cross the border. His wife is having an affair. She flees to the States with her lover. Jacob ends up following her. He has a transformation and becomes a late-middle-aged woman, who tries to shut down the town’s multiple dance schools. This is a basic summary of the apparent plot of the missing, fragmented novel. Which the author then rewrites in his own words. The author might be Jacob’s great great grandson. Then again he might not be. The translator adds his version. There is more exegesis. There are explanatory drawings which explain very little. There is also a latent hassidic mysticism to the book, which makes precise if baffling references to aspects of the Torah. In short, this brief book contains a degree of mystification which is impressive. What it all means I have no idea, but if you enjoy being bamboozled, this is a great read. I am looking forward to getting my hands on another of his books: The Uruguayan Book of the Dead. 

the incas (garcilaso de la vega)

Your mother was an Incan princess. Your father was a conquistador. You're bilingual. You grow up in the ruins of a civilisation that has been annihilated in the space of a generation. 

When you're 23 years old you leave your home country, never to return. You go to Spain and fight. For year after year. You're always going to be the black sheep. No matter what you achieve.

The more you fight in what the Spaniards call the old world, the more you value your own old world, which now has been subsumed by what the Spanish, of whom you are one, call the new world. 

The memories are stuck in your brain. Perhaps you have some of the details wrong but they're there. You're sitting in a tent in a dusty plain. About to fight the infidel yet again. And you realise what you have to do with the rest of your life. The only thing you can do. You have to write it all down.

las malas intenciones (w&d rosario garcia-montero)

This is the third Latin American film of recent years I've seen which posits a child's coming of age story within the context of the political violence of late 20th c Latin America. One supposes that the extension of this theme would be that the countries themselves (Argentina in the case of Kamchatka and Chile in the case of Wood's Machuca) will have to go through their own right of passage before they emerge into the calmer waters of the twenty first century. It's a cute angle for any filmmaker seeking to take a tangential look at their country's recent history, offering a less didactic approach than a film such as Noche de Los Lapices, which had an urgency conditioned by the fact that the events were still raw and terrifying.

As such Garcia-Montero's film fits into the continental discourse about the way in which societies have moved on (something also present in recent theatre). We watch the young girl Cayetana's story wondering to what extent the paranoia of her upper middle class parents conditions her world view. Not to mention the Hammer and Sickle burning on the hillside or the dead dogs which hang from the lamposts. We see all these things through the child's eyes: all around her the world is in flux. Her mother is a valium addict. Her absentee father a waster. In the midst of this she struggles to find a clear moral path, (hence the bad intentions of the title), seeing her imminently born baby brother as a mortal threat and finding no reason not to steal from her parents. It is as though all feeling has to be dampened down under the country's state of emergency. One of the film's most powerful scenes is when her bourgeois family attempt to leave the beach in a rowing boat, only to be pestered by a host of indigenous children. Risk is all around and things will have to be sacrificed, in particular normal human emotions, something the film's very last scene, when Cayetana finally discovers what it means to feel, illustrates.

The film rides to a large extent on Fatima Buntix's performance as Cayetana. She carries the film remarkably well, even when it starts to feel as though it loses its direction in the final third. There's a whimsical strand relating to her ancestor who participated in a losing battle against the Spanish, which, whilst adding colour, seems to diminish to an extent the intensity of Cayetana's story. At times if feels as though the film pulls its punches: it might have benefitted from having slightly worse intentions itself. The dramatic tension ebbs in the final third, with Cayetana's friend's near-death experience again distracting from the core of her relationships with her mother, father and stepfather.

Nevertheless, this is a rangy, intriguing film which casts a clear, cold eye over Peru's recent history. In keeping perhaps with the process of being a child growing up it seems to surf from highlight to highlight, with life drifting along during the bits in between whilst portentous events occur just around the corner. 

red april (santiago roncagliolo)

In the Andes, passing through on a bus, you'll see, every now and again, gatherings, colourful, particular, taking place in a carpark on a cold dusty plain or a field set back from a twisting road. You'll catch a glimpse of something you know you don't belong to and you would never belong to even if you lived in this place for hundreds of years. Which is pretty much the experience of the descendants of the Spanish as they co-exist with the descendants of the indigenous peoples they colonised, once upon a time. A people which continues to live alongside them, speaking a different language, wearing different clothes and, presumably, thinking different kinds of thoughts. The highlands of the Andes are as segregated as anywhere else in the world and still the retain the feel, perhaps, of an uneasy truce; an accommodation with history as much as an acceptance of it.

This world has been captured effectively in the films of Claudia Llosa: Madeinusa and La Teta Asustada. In Madeinusa, a stranger arrives in town and finds himself caught up in ancient traditions which overwhelm him. Red April’s hero, Felix Chacaltana finds himself similarly consumed in Roncagliolo’s literary take on the same theme. He is a prosecutor in the Andean town of Ayacucho, charged with solving a series of murders in a place where the guerilla campaign of Sendero Luminoso has never quite been extinguished. The book comes into its own when it starts to trace the ways in which the native cultural heritage has continued to thrive, even if this is under the guise of an adopted Catholicism. The indigenous attitudes towards death, explained by the priest, open the door to a completely different way of thinking which runs parallel to the Christianity adopted by the native population, part of the colonization process. This offers a fresh twist on the serial killer trope, as well as providing an insight into a culture which frequently seems closed and mysterious.

There is a debate to be had about whether the author is adopting an approach towards the native characters he employs which Said might have described as Orientalism. To a certain extent the book’s narrative twist confronts this. It is one of the problems literature continues to face in the twenty first century as writers attempt to come to terms with the crimes and misdemeanours committed by colonialism. How to create a space in the narrative for the “unspoken” perspective; and whether in so doing you effectively take advantage of that perspective as much as the colonisers did before you. Roncagliolo’s highly successful book seems conscious of these inherent contradictions, just as Llosa’s films are, but at times it felt as though it might have taken the reader further in its journey into the mindset of the other.