LETTER FROM CUZCO
In the huge hall of the Mar del Plata International Film Festival, Argentina, on November 11, director Marco Panatonic, originally from the Cuzco region (southeast of Peru), takes the stage, visibly moved. At 35, he has just received the award for best foreign feature film for his film Kinra (for “Natural Land”, not yet broadcast in Peru), filmed mainly in Quechua, the country’s second language. This is the highest distinction ever received for a Peruvian film, with Fausta (The asustada head), Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival in 2009, directed by Claudia Llosa. Kinra, which features non-professional actors, tells the story of a boy of peasant origin who emigrates to the city and tells of discrimination, adaptation but also life in the Andes.
Marco Panatonic has made this award a political standard, in a country where it is “very difficult to make films”, recalls the one who took almost ten years to complete his, especially when you come from the provinces. This success also illustrates an artistic evolution in the Peruvian cinematographic panorama: the rise and recognition of regional productions, often filmed in vernacular languages, when Lima has long concentrated most of the production. In a country two and a half times the size of France, made up of regions as diverse as the Andes or the Amazon, home to around forty indigenous languages, the phenomenon is welcomed. “This cinema is a reflection of our cultural and geographical diversity, it offers us a myriad of perspectives which enriches our knowledge of the country, offering both genre films and arthouse films. It’s a very creative cinema,” believes critic and researcher Emilio Bustamante.
“The best Peruvian cinema is now outside Lima », Recently affirmed the filmmaker Miguel Barreda, originally from Arequipa (second city of the country, in the South), in a local media. Regional films are now appearing in international festivals and winning awards. Public interest is also growing. If a few years ago “seeing a regional film was, for Limenians, as exotic as seeing an Iranian film”, as Arequipa director Roger Acosta pointed out, Emilio Bustamante ensures that Lima and its 10 million inhabitants constitute a varied audience increasingly curious to discover regional films. Especially since a good part of the inhabitants of Lima are themselves from the interior of the country.
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