“Our cinema, our stories, our power”: The politics of storytelling in contemporary Andean Cinema

Abstract

Since the end of the Peruvian internal armed conflict (1980–2000), official histories circulate through mainstream media and the boulevard press that narrate Andean regions as a nest of radical politics and violent disruptions deepening the disconnect between Lima and other provinces. As a response, a group of self-taught filmmakers from Ayacucho took up cameras to tell their own stories of violence and conflict, providing a critical perspective on official narratives and their disregard for the continuing social disparities. Keeping up with a long-standing tradition of local artists as critical intellectuals and narrators of people's histories, these filmmakers use new and accessible technologies to tell stories at the margins of public discourses defined by the capital Lima. In this context, the role of filmmaking can be understood as two-fold: an act of appropriation of western technologies and a technique to deliver justice to the people of Ayacucho through storytelling. In this article, I examine the creative practice of cinema-making in the Andes as a form of social intervention that seeks to resist contemporary memory regimes and allows for imagining alternative futures.