Quechua Film Series: Retablo (2019)
Join us for the third and final film in our Fall 2023 Quechua Film Series
RETABLO
Directed by Alvaro Delgado Aparicio, 2019, Peru, Quechua & spanish with English subtitles, starring: Magaly Solier, Junior Béjar Roca, Amiel Cayo
About the film
Segundo Paucar, a 14 year old boy wants to become a master story-box maker just like his father to carry on with the family legacy. On his way to a community celebration in the Andes, Segundo accidentally observes his father in a situation that shatters his whole world. Trapped in a chauvinistic environment, Segundo will try to deal in silence with all that is happening to him.
Q & A following the screening
Abstract: The Peruvian film Retablo deals with the construction of masculinities in Andean rural communities, where traditional gender roles are strictly enforced, and non-heterosexual behavior is punished. The plot focuses on a father-son relationship—14-year-old Segundo is becoming a craftsman under the guidance of his father, but his world shatters after discovering his father’s bisexuality. By learning how to navigate his father’s stigma and legacy, Segundo articulated an alternative model of masculinity that, nevertheless, seems to be at odds with Andean societies. These presentations will place Retablo in the Peruvian media landscape regarding its representation of sex/gender dissidence and Quechua rural life.
Presenters:
Javier Muñoz, Visiting Assistant Professor of World Languages, Cultures and Media at St. Lawrence University. His research focuses on the cultural history of the Andes and Amazon regions, Queer Studies, and Environmental Humanities.
Jermani Ojeda is a Quechua scholar from Peru. Jermani is a PhD Candidate in the Department of Spanish and Portuguese at the University of Texas, Austin. His research is in the field of Indigenous media, particularly the experience of Quechua people broadcasting through radio stations in the Peruvian Andes.
The Latin American and Latinx Studies Center (LALSC) provides an institutional space for research, teaching and discussion on Latin America and Latinx Studies at the University of Colorado at Boulder.
Quechua Language Program at CU Boulder offers a Quechua language program to undergraduate and graduate students at CU-Boulder, as well as to auditors from outside the university (for non-credit). This is the first time a Latin American Indigenous language fulfills the Foreign Languages MAPS and CORE Requirement at CU Boulder.
The Quechua Language Program is funded through a U.S. Department of Education UISFL Title VI Grant.
Quechua Film Series: Mama Irene: Healer of the Andes (2022)
Join us for the second film in our Fall 2023 Quechua Film Series: "Mama Irene: Healer of the Andes," a documentary by German filmmakers Elisabeth Mohlmann and Bettina Ehrhardt.
Mama Irene is a remarkable 84-year-old woman Shaman (healer) from Peru, drawing upon indigenous knowledge and traditions in danger of being lost forever. Yet her craft is based primarily on her own intuition: “Spirits have told me in my dreams how to proceed.”
The documentary follows Mama Irene in her everyday life, highlighting her healing methods and passion to serve each patient who knocks on her door: from local women who travel hours or days by foot through the Andes, to a medical doctor from India seeking a cure for the illness that Western Medicine had failed to help. The film also follows Mama Irene on ancient spiritual ceremonies such as the Snow Star Festival, where thousands of pilgrims gather in Sinakara Valley high in the Peruvian Andes.
Q&A following the screening with director Elisabeth Möhlmann and Magaly Quispe, grandaughter of Mama Irene.
The Quechua Language Program is funded through a U.S. Department of Education UISFL Title VI Grant.
Quechua Film Series: Mothers of the Land (2019)
The Quechua Film Series is a new series for Fall 2023 presented by the Quechua program at The Latin American and Latinx Studies Center (LALSC) at CU Boulder.
“Mothers of the Land” accompanies five women from the Andean highlands in their daily struggle to maintain a traditional and organic way of working the land. In the Andean Cosmovision, women and earth are strongly interrelated. Both, a women’s body and the earth’s soil are capable of giving and nurturing life. In the context of an ever-growing industrialization of agriculture, the use of chemical pesticides and genetically modified seeds, but it is women, who, connected to earth through bounds of sisterhood, take on the role of protectors.
Directors Diego Sarmiento and Àlvaro Sarmiento are two brothers from the Quechua community in Peru. They previously directed: Odisea Amazonica (2021), Sembradoras de Vida (2019) and Sonia’s Dream (2015).
Following the screening, the event featured commentary by:
Odi Gonzales, Clinical Associate Professor at NYU, is a Quechua native speaker, researcher, translator, professor and poet who has published scholarly books and a trilingual dictionary in the field of Quechua language, Oral Tradition, Latin American literature and poetry.
Claudia Arteaga, Associate Professor of Spanish, Latin American, and Caribbean Literatures and Cultures, Scripps College. Her research focuses on issues of representation and self-representation about and by indigenous peoples in Peru, Bolivia, and Guatemala through video and film.
The Quechua Language Program is funded through a U.S. Department of Education UISFL Title VI Grant.
Chile: 50 years after the coup
The coup in Chile 50 years ago left a complex legacy with lasting cultural, political, and economic impacts in the country and the Americas. Organized with support from the U.S. government, the coup toppled the first democratically-elected socialist government in the Americas and replaced it with a military dictatorship led by General Augusto Pinochet. Pinochet used the military to torture, kill, and disappearing opposition. The dictatorship also used its power to enact comprehensive free market reforms emblematic of neoliberalism. Though Pinochet left office in 1990, the dictatorship’s constitution, economic reforms, and disappearances remain.
This event included a screening of the film, The Coup in Santiago: The Last Days of Salvador Allende (2010), followed by comments from a panel of Chilean scholars. The event was highlighted in CU's Arts and Sciences magazine in an article about the Chilean dictatorship's legacy: read the article here.
Panelists:
Viviana Huiliñir Curio, CU Geography
Andrés MacAdoo, PhD
Julio Sepúlveda, CU Geological Sciences
Joe Bryan, CU Latin American and Latinx Studies (moderator)