1Introduction: Film as Practice
‘You foolish academics!
Stop analysing and come to see what we do and listen to what we say.
You'll find that we don't make films to reinvent the past.
Instead, we build community to create better futures through art – our art.’
Lalo Parra, filmmaker and art teacher from Ayacucho, interview 2017
2In 2017, I returned to Ayacucho to conduct an ethnographic study concerned with the memories of the Peruvian internal armed conflict (1980-2000) and an emerging scene of horror filmmakers, which, at this point, had been studied by social scientists for more than a decade (e.g., Cabrera 2007; Cabrejo 2010; Cano López 2010; Del Pino 2014; Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017a/b; Ulfe 2020). Critics coined the terms acción y violencia social (action and social violence) or realismo social (social realism) to describe the style and genre of these movies made by predominantly self-taught filmmakers whose stories were characterised by an ‘emphasis on the description or denunciation of violence inflicted on individuals or communities in specific historical circumstances’ (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017a: 68). Earlier films narrate the filmmakers’ personal experiences during the internal armed conflict, which, as many of them explained, was a response to official memory narratives from which Ayacuchans had felt excluded. Over the years, the filmmakers expanded their repertoire to include horror movies inspired by popular folk and cautionary tales about foreign or spiritual threats against the community. Scholarly works analysing these films argued that the horrors depicted in the movies and the stories of horror experienced in the region from pre-colonial times until today were a way of processing collective experiences of violence and seeking justice through the means of storytelling. I was intrigued by how violent horror and action dramas featuring resurrected Incas or brain-eating Alpacas could be doing justice to a community that had been affected by political violence and armed conflict over centuries.
3What I found was a vibrant community of film enthusiasts held together by a shared passion for storytelling. In the 90s, ‘cinema was the newest thing, and we wanted to be part of that future’ (Interview Morales 2016), I was told by Carlitos, the cameraman who had worked on many of the films made. Cinema, it appeared, was not merely a storytelling device but a powerful technology through which an exciting future was within reach. Hence, understanding their artistic practice solely as a way of working through histories of violence or contesting dominant memory narratives seemed inconclusive. There was something else happening that I felt compelled to explore by engaging with the ways cinema was being made and viewed here. This article responds to concerns raised by filmmaker and art teacher Lalo Parra during one of our conversations, not to think about cinema from Ayacucho merely in terms of plots and storylines but to consider how storytelling as a creative practice embodies imagined futures, not just by reframing or fictionalising shared experiences but by creating a community of storytellers.
4Trained as a visual anthropologist and filmmaker, I approached the art and craft of cinema-making through ethnographic filmmaking. Understanding the moving image to ‘make itself sensuously and sensibly manifest as the expression of experience by experience’ (Sobchack 1992: 3), I sought to connect with my research partners through ‘crafting together’ and putting our filmmaking practice, both theirs and ours, at the centre of my enquiry – a phenomenology of the filmmaking experience of sorts. Using a camera to observe the processes involved in cinema-making meant attending to the diverse possibilities of understanding human experience through the practice of making things, whilst also considering its limitations as a knowledge-making practice (Westmoreland 2022: 174).
- 1 This film piece is a re-edited version of the documentary film Horror in the Andes (Dietrich 2019).
5The result is this multimodal article, which features a film piece1 that engages with cinema-making through the lens of future-making. We follow three friends, Martin, Lucho and Carlitos, as they set out to make a horror movie. The film takes an observational approach to explore the relationships between art, memory and community in-the-making. The story begins like this article, inviting an academic audience to see how creative expression builds the communities of the future. The textual part offers a different kind of analysis. Text here allows for what my audio-visual material could not deliver, namely to situate the filmmakers and their community’s trajectory within a more complex socio-political context and its continuous transformations since the early 1980s. I draw parallels between the politics of memory in Peru and the cultural politics of the national film industry, which both seem to reduce Ayacuchan filmmaking to its visions of the past. Overlooking the situated practices that generate these stories, we, the academic community, disregard the generative potential of creative communities to build (alternative) futures.
Ayacuchan Cinema In-The-Making
6
Video-Link: https://vimeo.com/967783504
7The story of this film piece took shape on production sets, roaming the streets of Huamanga (Ayacucho City) in search of actors and props or testing equipment in people’s homes and garages. Past, present and future – common notions of Western temporality – locate the passing of time in a matter-of-fact manner. And yet, in understanding this film material anew, it becomes apparent that the experience of time is never predetermined or already established, not even in storylines, film scripts or time frames. Instead, pasts, presents and futures arise as ephemeral constellations in situated practices, such as figuring out how to prepare a skull to feature in a horror scene, building a rig to create new camera angles or imagining one’s character’s state of mind when facing the Spanish invaders. Conceptualisations of time often fail to consider people’s experience of time, its situatedness: for how we live through time is entangled with everyday life and its concerns, like production costs, work commitments and family obligations. Experiencing time is relational as it matters how people understand themselves and relate to others. Whether they are churchgoers, victim-survivors, Quechua speakers, well-off, queer or “man enough”, with a view on practice, one cannot but take notice of the plurality of frameworks that are at play in people’s lives.
8And yet, experience as narrated through our camera lens and editing can only offer a partial view of people and the sensory, affective, material and symbolic worlds they must navigate. Framed and arranged into a story with a beginning, middle and end, a narrative can evoke worlds of inequality and their transformative potentials (Biehl and Locke 2017: 3), but more than anything, it is indicative of the relationship between the narrator and who is narrated. No one speaks from nowhere according to philosopher Hans Gadamer. He argued that telling stories about others requires considering one’s own positioning, not as an ethical but fundamentally epistemological stance (Gadamer 1992: 302). To understand what we know, we need to consider how we know, ‘not as a way of being but a way of becoming something else – learning from experience’ (Laplante, Scobie and Grandsman 2020: 8).
9Filmmaking embodies this proposition perhaps more than any other modality since filming can literally only occur from a particular point of view (Lawrence and Dietrich 2024). Here, my view was construed by an intellectual ambition to come close to the processes of crafting and engaging with the experiences of making films and telling stories that the established analytical frameworks had evaded, at least according to my protagonists. Yet, I was one of those scholars, here to examine a social world through their experience of it. They did not send me away, not because I made a commitment to think with them. There was a curiosity that worked in my favour. My family was from the North of Peru, I said, but the sound of my European accent placed me in unknown territory. I arrived with a cameraman from Mexico and an English sound recordist. What is your story, they asked me over and over again, but the story they imagined of me was bigger than what I could deliver. “Who knows,” they may have thought, “there may be more to her.” So we were allowed to stay, record and reflect on our craft. As a filmmaker, I was conscious of the work involved in the process of making a film. What I found in Ayacucho was an almost reckless readiness to plunge into the arduous labour of being creative without any funding, public (or private) support systems or promise of financial returns. These projects existed not because but despite the country's cultural politics that had ignored filmmaking in Ayacucho since its beginnings. This community of filmmakers, including directors, writers, actors, prop artists, etc., was formed on the basis of voluntary work, individual passions and ambitions, costly sacrifices and stubborn visions of owning a collective past. The other side of the coin was a systemic lack of resources and training, which were patched up by resourceful improvisation, often insufficient to make up for what was missing.
10With the production of La Maldicion del Inca (The curse of the Inca) passing its 10th year, this film may never see the light of day as one film. Yet, the many occasions on which the crew came together to watch individual scenes on a bedsheet screen made me wonder whether it mattered. “It matters”, according to Martin, who carried the bulk of production costs so far. “I would, of course, like to share our film with an audience so I can be remembered as the filmmaker who told our stories” (Interview Ccorahua 2018), he added. Martin’s words suggest that he has a future of memory in mind. According to memory scholar Elizabeth Jelin (2021), it is an imagined future that motivates people to become the tellers of their own histories. In this sense, reducing cinema from Ayacucho to re-writes of violent pasts misconstrues their practice. Instead, their filmmaking re-entangles past, present, and imagined futures in the process of choosing one’s own becoming. In other words, cinema from Ayacucho is not memory; it is memory-making.
11The production of the first Ayacuchan films took place in 1992, shortly after the defeat of the self-declared Partido Comunista del Perú, Sendero Luminoso (Degregori 2010), internationally known as Shining Path, one of two deadly insurgent organisations that had declared war against the Peruvian state in the early 1980s. Despite the ongoing dictatorship of Alberto Fujimori, the absence of bombs, dead bodies and curfews was enough to get young men and women back out onto the streets and begin re-imagining the world with the newly accessible video technology (Interview Parra 2016). According to Lucho Berrocal, ‘the handheld camera was like a window to the future and we all wanted a glimpse’ (Interview Berrocal 2018). Movies like Lágrimas de Fuego (1996) and Dios tarda pero no olvida (1997) were low-budget action dramas based on the filmmakers’ own lived experiences during the Peruvian internal armed conflict and its immediate aftermaths.
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12The stories and characters speak of innocent people broken or corrupted by the violence that unfolded in their communities. In Lágrimas de Fuego [Tears of Fire] (José Huertas Pérez 1996), the protagonists struggle to cope with the atrocities they experienced during the armed conflict, which eventually turns them into perpetrators of violence against their loved ones. The film Dios tarda pero no olvida2 [God Takes His Time, but He Doesn’t Forget] (Palito Ortega Matute 1996) speaks of the trauma passed on to the next generation through continued violence. Other films like Sangre Inocente3 [Innocent Blood] (Palito Ortega Matute 2001) or Gritos de Libertad [Cries of Freedom] (José Huertas Pérez, Lucho Berrocal and Mélinton Eusebio 2003) are explicit in telling the story of civilians caught in-between the fires of Shining Path and the Peruvian state forces, exposing the suffering caused by coercion, torture and forced disappearance. The films also reflect what the filmmakers experienced in their early youth when the conflict had ended but the violence continued. Gang criminality, alcoholism, drug abuse and domestic violence filled the vacuum the conflict had left. ‘The brutality we saw in our city continued after Shining Path’, as Lalo Parra explained (Interview Parra 2016). ‘Even though there was no money in this business’, he continued, ‘these were important stories that had to be told.’
- 4 The television documentary Al final del tunel (‘At the end of the tunnel’ 2007) was commissioned by (...)
- 5 The film Chavín de Huántar: El rescate del siglo (‘Liberation of the century’ 1999) shows the her (...)
- 6 The fictionalized mini-series Operación Rescate (‘Operation Rescue’ 2010) was screened on national (...)
- 7 The military museum Chavín de Huántar opened its doors in 2009, inviting the public to celebrate (...)
13There were only a few cameras in circulation at the time, but the young film enthusiasts were keen to make movies with whatever means available. Building a vibrant community of self-taught actors, editors, directors and scriptwriters was invigorating, but the young artists and storytellers also shared a purpose. The late film director Palito Ortega described in an interview (Del Pino 2013) how a young generation sought to respond to a national discourse that stigmatised Ayacucho as the cradle of terrorist insurgency. The stories arriving from the capital, Lima, narrated the state forces as the conflict’s heroes who liberated the nation from the threat of terrorism that originated from the Andes. This so-called ‘salvation trope’ (Milton 2014a, 2014b) was echoed in documentaries4, films5, television series6 and museum exhibits7 depicting the violence inflicted by the state forces as the price to be paid for protecting Peru’s freedom and democracy. Young Ayacuchans, who had been children and young teenagers during the 1980s and 1990s, saw themselves as the expendable other, betrayed by a nation-state they had only come to know as the aggressor. Martin explains:
‘You have to imagine that we saw what the police and military were doing on the streets and the endless rumours of people being tortured in the cartels and prisons and of their bodies being burned or thrown into rivers. All along, we were afraid of Shining Path, too, who did horrible things if you didn’t give them food or shelter or worse if you opposed them. The streets were full of horror stories, and there was no state to help us.’ (Interview Ccorahua 2018)
Lagrimas de Fuego was produced by Wari Films between 1994 and 1996; with Liz Huertas, Maritza Cueto, Yovana Huamani Huamán, Wilfredo Gómez Silva, Maribel Arana Mesías, Martin Ccorahua Illanes, Cesar Gálvez Alarcón, Luis Berrocal Godoy, Flavio Alarcón Vilcatoma, José Gabriel Huertas Pérez and Roger Castillo.
Photo by Courtesy of Luis Berrocal Godoy.
14With an estimated 69,280 people killed (CVR 2003, Annex 2: 1), Ayacucho was the region most severely devastated by both insurgent and state violence, claiming almost a third of the total casualties, predominantly from Quechua-speaking communities. Shortly after the collapse of Fujimori’s regime, which marked the end of the conflict, an interim government assigned a Truth Commission to investigate the extent of the horrors experienced during the two decades of violence. The commission’s final report revealed fatal errors in military intelligence and intervention, next to widespread human rights violations inflicted on mainly indigenous populations. It concluded that racism, negligence and abuse of power were the presumable causes for the disproportionate and systematic use of violence on all sides, particularly in Ayacucho where the threat of Shining Path against the local population was imminent (CVR 2004). On the other hand, there were animosities and stigmatisations from within and between victimised communities where neighbours had turned into enemies (Theidon 2014, Robin 2021). After the conflict, these communities were left to rebuild a social fabric torn to pieces. In many respects, these findings acknowledged the experiences of the young Ayacuchan cinema-makers. And yet, little of this research became known to the filmmakers since dissemination was feeble (Ulfe and Sobogal 2021), and subsequent government institutions showed little interest in circulating reports that pointed at unstable democratic institutions and deep-seated societal divisions.
15When anthropologist Ponciano del Pino asked the film director Palito Ortega what he wanted his films to achieve, the latter answered, ‘(…) My movies are meant to serve as documents, so people can say, “this is how the violence really was for us here”’ (Ortega Matute in Del Pino 2014: 154). By fictionalising real stories and showing how the violence inflicted by both state forces and Shining Path affected people, he sought to give evidence of a silenced truth about the conflict for the generations to come. This claim to victimhood is sustained by a narrative in which both insurgents and state forces were the alien other that entered his community and spoiled a harmonious life. Ortega’s stories, however, not only speak of victimhood but also of the Peruvian state’s moral obligation to acknowledge people from Ayacucho as Peruvian citizens drawing on long histories of racialised discrimination against Peru’s Indigenous and Quechua-speaking communities.
- 8 When a development-orientated reparation plan began determining degrees of victimhood and eligibili (...)
16Ayacuchan Cinema reflects this palpable sentiment of disregard and abandonment ‘from all sides’ during and after the conflict, with state forces, government officials or NGO workers often occupying the roles of corrupt officials, useless bureaucrats or well-meaning but ignorant outsiders. Palito Ortega’s films El Rincón de los Inocentes [The Innocent’s Corner] (2005) and La Casa Rosada [The Pink House] (2016) tell stories of violence and suffering, with people being uncared for by the state and disregarded by the nation in the years after the conflict8. Despite often-unnuanced generalisations, these films offered a diversification of existing memory narratives, which until then had been stuck between the tropes of ‘salvation’ or ‘memory-as-duty’ (Hibbett 2020: 217), with a palpable absence of Quechua-speakers as authors of these stories. In this sense, post-conflict memory in Peru and its national film industry may have an undesirable commonality: they are defined by an unequal distribution of power between Lima and other regions of the country, exacerbating long-standing social divisions. The lack of diversity of stories and storytellers marks the contours of a memory discourse and a film industry both continuing to believe that the conflict had been an indigenous matter until it arrived in Lima. In this context, fictional storytelling provides a necessary space in which representations of violent pasts and their social realities can be contested and negotiated. Ayacuchan films offer these contrasting perspectives by implicating the state and Peruvian society.
- 9 Chile, Bolivia, Peru, Ecuador and Colombia.
- 10 Quechua, Aymara, Jaqaru, and Kawki and Spanish.
17A point of contention in my conversations with filmmakers was the question of where to situate cinema from Ayacucho locally – as Ayacuchan, Andean and/or Peruvian. The disagreements over identifying cinema from Ayacucho as local, regional or national reflect the conflicting notions of being and belonging that extend beyond the film industry into the realm of a fractured nation. Filmmakers and moviegoers from Ayacucho speak of ‘our cinema’ to express the idea of being part of and feeling represented by the stories, styles and productions that originate from Ayacucho (Dietrich 2023: 50). ‘Andean Cinema’ is a term that filmmakers in Ayacucho believe to originate from Lima, introduced by the film industry there to distance themselves from a way of doing cinema that they consider precarious and unprofessional. ‘Andean’ was a term hardly used in Ayacucho, with the Andes so close to home and yet stretching across a whole continent, five countries9, five languages10 and worlds of similarities and differences. ‘Our cinema is more Peruvian than it is Andean, but not everyone sees it like that’, Martin explained (Interview Ccorahua 2018), referring to the experience that their contribution to national cinema faced latent snobbery from film critics and industry gatekeepers.
18More than twenty years and around a hundred movies after the beginnings of cinema-making in Ayacucho, I bump into a local cinemagoer waiting in a queue to see Mélinton Eusebio’s Bullying Maldito (2015)11. Since its premiere a few years back, the film has regularly been screened at the municipal theatre. It tells the story of a girl who endures abuse and harassment by her peers for her boyish appearance. Adapted from the cautionary tale of Maria Marimacha that, in its traditional form, reinforced the hetero norm, this remake exposes toxic masculinities and gender violence, according to critics (Bustamante 2021). When I ask the man in the queue what the cinema from Ayacucho means to him, he tells me, ‘Our cinema tells our stories in the places we know and with the faces we recognise’. Filmmakers reclaiming a sense of control over their (hi)stories on the big screen seems to transpire to their audiences, thus becoming a regenerative force.
- 12 For exceptions, see for instance, Bustamante and Luna Victoria (2017b), Ulfe (2020), Dietrich (2020 (...)
19While a rich body of textual scholarly work has significantly contributed to the analyses and visibility of Peruvian Cinema from all the regions, less attention has been paid to the parallels that can be drawn between the politics that facilitate memory and the politics that facilitate cultural identity.12 In this article, I have shown how filmmakers seeking to express themselves artistically and remember histories of violence are fighting two different battles in one arena. On the one hand, they wish to appropriate historical narratives amidst polarised memory discourses. On the other hand, they seek to challenge the cultural politics defining the possibilities and limitations of their storytelling. The sentiments evoked by a discourse that maintains a conceptual separation between ‘national/Peruvian’ and ‘Andean’ inevitably bring notions of belonging and citizenship into conflict.
20Anthropologist Alfred Gell argued that an art object can actively shape interactions or initiate ‘causal sequences’ (Gell 1998: 16) between its makers, users, patrons, audiences and, indeed, itself; that is, it can exert agency. For producers of movies and producers of memory, this agency not only articulates a desire for empowerment but also empowers by actively contributing to the imagination of a collective future. This imagination also expresses a desire for the cultural valorisation of their craft within Peruvian society and its creative industry, which filmmakers from Ayacucho and their audiences have experienced as discriminatory and condescending. Indeed, despite the provincials’ keen interest for locally produced films that manifests in packed movie theatres, public funding to support educational training and access to production and distribution networks still needs to be improved (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017b: 211).
21Despite the limitations, there is an appreciation for beautiful images and narrative styles. With the movies of Jean-Claude Van Damme or Steven Seagal often mentioned as early inspiration, films from Ayacucho show a preference for fast pans, zooming-in or moving around central characters as well as eccentric costumes. This global flow and appropriation of styles that have shaped Ayacucho’s cultural productions is a testament to the region’s connectedness and constant transformation (Weismantel 2001: xxi). With filmmakers owning their cinema and creating an aesthetic that is situated as well as (globally) connected, space becomes another dimension that does not exist as ‘here’ or ‘there’ but as a constellation that creates something new.
22However, operating in a limited commercial context highly dependent on a local market, stakeholders recoup only a small portion of their privately invested money through public screenings. Some even make losses due to piracy, digital viewing platforms and lack of infrastructure for screenings. This adds to the difficult commercialisation of their work, a problem that many Peruvian filmmakers have voiced (Bustamante and Luna Victoria 2017a: 52). Filmmakers themselves agree that there is a need for more resources to raise production quality. Under these circumstances, trades like directing, recording, acting, costumes etc. cannot be turned into occupations but have to remain “passions”. Also attributed to the absence of institutional and societal support is the absence of female creators amongst the mostly cis-hetero male directors and producers. ‘What you see is that women are more sensible – they look after their families but making films here is not a responsible thing. It’s the opposite, really’ (Interview Parra 2016). In other words, in Ayacucho irresponsibility is a privilege that only man can afford, which is one other tangent of the imbalances and inequalities traversing the country as well as the film industry.
23Amidst the recent political turmoil resulting from widespread protests against the government, President Dina Boluarte referred to Puno, another region of the Andes south of Ayacucho, as not being Peruvian.13 Statements like these violently re-surface the polarising narrative of here and there, us and them, past and future. In December 2022, the unrest culminated in massacres in Puno and Ayacucho, leaving 50 people dead and 821 injured. According to the UN High Commissioner for Human Rights, the killings were the result of excessive use of force by the police and the military, particularly in the Andean regions. What could the future look like if terms such as Ayacuchan, Andean and Peruvian were no longer in conflict or contradictory? Answers can only be found in responding to the persistent inequalities – institutional and social – with respect, care and much curiosity.
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