By Carla Samón Ros |
Lima (EFE) the absence of the “clichés” that have historically accompanied the Andean world of Peru, which it claims as a “living culture” and far from the “exotic”.
“I think the success of the film is because people are not used to seeing human beings in Quechua (…) who know how to love, suffer, laugh, who have the full range of sensitivities that human beings have (because) they have always been associated with the Quechua world to sadness, to the guerrilla and to misery”, says the filmmaker in an interview with EFE.
Through the seventh art, Galindo tries to show that Peruvian Andean world as “a living culture”.
“That we have not disappeared, that we are not anthropological, nor exotic, nor folkloric beings, that we are human beings like any other people in the world”, highlights the director who was born in a small town in the department of Ayacucho, in the middle of the mountains.
“Right to exist”
Set in the 1970s, “Willaq Pirqa” tells the story of Sistu, an endearing ten-year-old boy who discovers, with genuine amazement, the magic of cinema in a remote village in the Peruvian Andes.
This discovery confronts his community with its culture and, before that, the boy is chosen to go to town every week to see a movie and tell it to everyone in the square, but Sistu’s passion for telling stories leads him to create his own cinema, with its own characters, plots and, above all, language.
“We have the right to exist with our own culture, to write it with our own hands, to feel it with our own hearts, to speak it in our own language. We have the right to tell our stories”, reflects the filmmaker.
The entire film, which is reminiscent of drama and comedy, and even flirts with musicals, was shot in various locations in the southern region of Cuzco and in Quechua, although Galindo used Spanish in some very specific scenes, as a kind of wink. critical of taxation
He uses it, for example, when the community sings the Peruvian national anthem, in Spanish, to “show how absurd that obligation is” to sing, at 4,000 meters above sea level, in a language that is not theirs and to a State that ” He doesn’t offer them anything.”
“Why in my country are we going to force a high sector of the population to be migrants in their own country?” he wonders.
“The Reporting Wall,” motion picture record
The embryo of the film dates back to 2006, when Galindo sketched the first lines of a script that, 18 years later, would break records in the cinematographic history of his country.
Today, “Willaq Pirqa” accumulates more than 80,000 viewers and expects to remain on the billboard for 14 weeks since its premiere on the big screen on December 8, just one day after the failed self-coup attempted by former President Pedro Castillo.
In fact, the showing of the film in movie theaters has coincided, in time and space, with unprecedented political and social tension in Peru, plunged into a wave of anti-government protests that has claimed the lives of 70 people, according to various sources. sources.
Galindo says he has not “digested” whether this phenomenon influenced the success of his film’s premiere, but he maintains that, perhaps, people “found the film as a refuge or suddenly the higher social classes as a way of justifying the existence of that cinema”.
In any case, the filmmaker believes that, despite the fact that the protests revealed the enormous inequalities in Peruvian society, “all” citizens, regardless of their social class or origin, recognize themselves, in “different percentages”, with their culture ancestral.
And, in the end, “Willaq Pirqa” managed to conquer thousands of Peruvians and become, as its creator wanted, an “object” to “discuss and reflect on the culture and people” of Quechua, of which more than 5 million Peruvians belong feel part of it.