Peruvian director Leonardo Barbuy and his producer Illari Orcottoma Mendoza came to present the feature film Diogenes, in competition at the Rencontres Cinélatino in Toulouse. A beautifully filmed family drama and chronicle set in the Ayacucho region of the Andes. On a ridge between fiction and documentary, the camera focuses on the daily life of a father and his two children, protected by a pack of dogs.
from our special correspondent in Toulouse,
Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek, the original, nicknamed “the dog or “the cynic”, was an outsider who lived far from the community of men. We owe him a sentence passed on to posterity, recalls Leonardo Barbuy: the more I know men, the more I love my dog… Our Diogenes in the film also lives far from the world, in an isolated cottage on the mountainside. He is a craftsman who paints tables, in real life and in the movie (by candlelight), who raises her two children alone, in real life and in the movie. These tables (literally planks) are works painted on agave bark (maguey) that tell the daily life or the extraordinary events that the community experiences. Literally, the director and producer explain to us, their Quechua name means something like ” tell the memory “. The municipality of Sarhua, in the region of Ayacucho, where the film was shot, is known for this art and the desire to work with this community was decisive in the development of the film project. Prior to writing the screenplay, there was anthropological research on life in this region, its legends and rituals.
A community hit, like the whole region, by the violence of the armed conflict in Peru, opposing the army to the Shining Path. Between 1980 and 2000, Peru experienced an internal armed conflict that resulted in more than 70,000 dead and 20,000 missing. In Diogenes’ house, the camera lingers on some of his works. We see masked and armed men in the middle of the peasants. Two of them drag a woman by those long braids worn by the Quechua Indians. We are in an adobe house with a tin roof, built for the needs of the film on land rented from the community. The film crew had to transport the equipment, water, food, etc., on steep paths that one can easily imagine watching the children trudge on these vertiginous slopes.
At the heart of Quechua culture
In this community, all the inhabitants speak Quechua, tell us the director Leonardo Barbuy and his producer Illari Orcottoma Mendoza (Mosaico), arrived in Toulouse already crowned with the prizes Biznaga silver for best Ibero-American film and Biznaga silver for best director at the Malaga festival in Spain. It should also be noted that this feature film also comes from Cinélatino’s Cinéma en construction: last year it won the special mention of the Grand Prix Cinéma en construction, a nice achievement already. The actors – non-professionals – are all bilingual and Leonardo Barbuy says he gave them a lot of leeway in the exchanges so that they appropriated them with their culture, he himself not being a Quechua speaker had written his scenario in Castilian. Me, I wouldn’t say it like that to my children, suggested Jorge Pomacanchari, who plays the father, suggesting another way of saying…
Jorge Pomacanchari accompanied the film from the very beginning of the process in 2016, and he is impressive for the strength he exudes, especially in his magnetic gaze, facing the camera. Here, life is harsh and bare, like the interior of this house where you can light up with a kerosene lamp. The scene of the meal where we can barely see the bowls on which are unrolled scarves of thick smoke, would not have been denied by the real Diogenes of Sinope. A few still images, however, show us the village community dressed in its finery for a ceremony: magnificence of the costumes with regard to the simplicity of everyday life. Poses, without folklorism, which recall the photographs of Martin Chambithe famous Andean photographer.
A sumptuous black and white photograph
The historical context of this past violence perhaps explains the voluntary isolation of Diogenes, with his big dogs – who protect the little family – and his children: a little boy, Santiago, who plays like all the little boys in the campaign tearing off the legs of beetles, while his older sister, Sabina, tells him Indian legends of monsters in the hollow of his ear and would like to accompany his father to the village to sell the paintings. He refuses on the grounds that she is too innocent… The children are first cousins in real life and the complicity operates on screen. The village, we see little, on the other hand the mountain, the bare sides of the Andes, the brushwood, the rocks, filmed in black and white, are sumptuous. The tall eucalyptus trees wave in the wind and the soundtrack, created by the director who is also a composer, accompanies the mystery and power of this nature. Two cinematographers worked on the image, Mateo Guzman and Musuk Nolte. The latter, a photographer who always works in black and white and who knows the Andes well, has just been rewarded at the World press Photo(for a photo on the oil spill in Peru), emphasizes Leonardo Barbuy.
When it is suggested to the director that his film is both fiction and documentary, he claims to be Victor Erice: the only fiction is the “I”, assures the Spanish director… These are convenient categories for film festivals, but in cinema, there is a strong interpenetration between the two, insofar as the creative process is always imbued with subjectivity. Comments also in Toulouse made by Ignacio Aguero And Tatiana Huezo (to which producer Illari Orcottoma Mendoza pays a vibrant tribute). The film opens with a sort of ceremony, the cremation of one of the family dogs… we won’t reveal how it ends, but the director and his producer remind us of the situation of great instability in which he finds himself. Peru for a few years with the waltz of presidents, the trials for corruption, the discrimination of which the Indians are victims and the recent demonstrations against President Boluarte, violently repressed…
► Read also : In Peru, President Boluarte heard for the bloody repression of demonstrations
Two days ago, the Museum of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion was closed in Miraflores, for technical reasons, while Amnesty International was to submit its annual report there. A whole context that makes films like Diogenes. A beautiful tribute to these communities and a beautiful film.
► The Cinélatino festival website