Lucanamarca (review)

The Sendero Luminoso (Shining Path), a Maoist group established in the 1970s by philosophy professor Abimael Guzmán, was, in the early 1980s beginning to establish a base of operations in the Peruvian countryside - remote areas where the state had little or no presence. Aiming to overthrow the government, Shining Path militants attempted to recruit Quechuan peasants to join their struggle, often virtually taking over villages and introducing their own highly doctrinal education system. High in the Andes, the small farming village of Lucanamarca was one of the first to feel the brutality of what was, in effect, an undeclared civil war. On 3 April 1983, sixty-nine villagers – including pregnant women and children as young as three years old -were killed by guerrillas of the Sendero Luminoso. Some were shot where they stood, others rounded up and 'executed' in the village's main square.

Set against the backdrop of a visit, some twenty years later, by Peru's Truth and Reconciliation Commission (ostensibly to exhume the bodies of those survivors that still lay hidden beneath the ground around the surrounding countryside and an attempt to ascertain both their identities and causes of death), Lucanamarca seeks to unravel the events leading up to the massacre and explore the long term consequences upon the lives of those affected. In realty, and in line with experiences in El Salvador, Chile and Argentina, the Cardenas and Galvez's documentary shows that the Commission merely exacerbated underlying (and in some cases dormant) tensions and long-held enmities. In particular they contrast the experience of those who lost love ones in the massacre and the experience of the family of Olegario Curitomay, a villager appointed as the Luminoso's representative in the area. So, whilst the majority of the villagers featured in the film suffered terrible losses in the massacre (indeed some are the sole survivors of their families), the film also explores Curitomay's murder the day before the attack after his part in drawing-up 'death lists' for the village. What the film shows is that the origins of the violence in Lucanamarca lay in both the nature of the Sendero Luminoso's operational methods of indoctrination and the ways that rebelling against them by the killing Curtiomay led to such bloody retribution.

The testimones Cardenas and Galvez present tentatively suggest that, in fact, numerous villagers were involved with the group before the massacre, with Curitomay's remaining family arguing that they are but one of many who, were associated in some way with the Sendero Luminoso. What becomes clear in Lucanamarca is that what the villagers really want from the Commission is not just the burial of the retrieval and burial of their loved ones (important as that is to them) but that the government make good on the promises it made, after an official visit from then president Alejandro in 2004, to provide roads from which they can take their goods to market reduce the sense of remoteness that, in part, created the conditions for the massacre to begin with.

Carlos Cardenas and Hector Galvez's film, a recipient of an Alter-Ciné Foundation grant, has technical flaws to be sure. The editing is, at times, somewhat slipshod and the restricted budget tends to mean that the intrusive Andean mountain winds can sometimes impinge upon dialogue clarity. Indeed, it is, perhaps, the editing which is the film's biggest flaw. Whilst the story being told clearly has complex roots, at times the reconstruction of that narrative is frustratingly underdeveloped. At 69 minutes the running time is slight and means that those involved are given little time to properly tell their stories. And yet, this is the kind of low-budget documentary whose subject matter is far more important than its cinematic qualities. Indeed, perhaps the films biggest weakness is also, perversely, its biggest strength. The lack of clarity brought about by the films speedy conclusion can, at times, be confusing but in so being it mirrors the complexity of the events it attempts...