Documentary
Runan Caycu
Nora de Izcue · 1973
Synopsis
Facing the camera, the peasant leader Saturnino Huillca tells his life story and the reasons that led the Quechua peasants of the south of the country to organise into unions, in the sixties, to confront the gamonales and the hacendados. Photographs and images of festivals filmed at Paucartambo and Ninamarca accompany his account, which also shows the repression by the troops sent against them before the agrarian reform.
Context
The journalist and historian Hugo Neira, who had told the story of Saturnino Huillca's struggle in a book, spoke to the director about him and wrote the screenplay with her. The National System of Social Mobilisation, where Neira was in charge of dissemination, took charge of production, and the film was completed in Havana with the Cuban Film Institute, from August to October 1973; Jorge Suárez had operated the camera, Mirita Lores did the editing. Censored, it was not released in cinemas in Peru and circulated in trade unions and film clubs; it was also entered at the festival of the peoples in Florence.
Who it is for
A testimony in black and white, carried by Saturnino Huillca alone, with no intervention from the filmmakers. It is necessary to know that the agrarian reform has been carried out by the time the film appears.
Prizes and reception
Silver Dove, second prize, at the Leipzig documentary festival; one of the first films to let Quechua be heard as a language of identity and resistance.