“An opaque doorway” into a horrifying past: Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski’s documentary essay recounts the colonial crimes in Peru.
“The ghosts who inhabit these images weren’t asked if they could be captured, nor did they approve them, and in many cases they were forced to appear in them.”, notes Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski while showing these images within a larger compilation of black and white archival footage on screen. The historic depictions in question are photographies and an archival film footage of the indigenous people of Peru, Sadowski home country. Its complicated history of colonialism and collective trauma has shaped her filmic work. Her essayist exploration of fraught memory and the twisted legacy o colonialism premiered at Berlinale, albeit only in the Forum section.
The film’s placement at the liminal region of the festival program seems indicative of its blurry proposition and murky concept. At the center of the personal account is Sadowski’s emotional reaction at a photograph taken around 1910 of two indigenous Peruvian men, named Aredomi and Omario. They wear western clothes and hold each other’s hand, though it’s unclear if they were told to do so or if it’s a spontaneous gesture. Sadowski recounts how the image caught her eye and ingrained itself in her memory, even though she couldn’t tell what set this one apart from the other historical pictures she was looking through.
Her attempt to find out more about the men led her on a trail to the horrors of Peruvian colonial times. Enslavement, rape, torture, mutilation, willful killings and even mass murder of adults and children alike were common on the rubber plantations such as those of Julio Cesar Arana. Devious, deceitful and sadistic, the influential merchant and later politician would become infamous as main perpetrator of the Putamayo genocide. His atrocities reached an extend that shocked even his contemporaries. One of them was Irish diplomat Roger Casement who had investigated the crimes of Leopold II in the Congo prior to his detachment to Peru.
There he found more than proof of Arana’s human rights violation which he detailed in his diary. Excerpts from his writings serve as commentary to the archival footage of indigenous people, footage which was largely commissioned by Arana’s company. It’s a significant pairing that reminds the audience of Casement’s complicity in the colonialist wrongs. While he intended to stop Arana, he also presented and treated the Indigenous people as objects, only that they were to him objects of anthropological studies. For such purposes he picked them to be taken to London where European intellectuals could study them, talk to them and gape at them.
In such poignant moments of creative juxtaposition and interconnection, Sadowski manages to deconstruct the European humanitarian ideal and to highlight the many facets of the colonialist perspective. However, within this complexity lie the challenges of her film. It is ultimately consumed as intellectual entertainment by a predominantly Western audience. This provokes the question if the work serves as counter narrative to the colonial perspective or if it cleverly repurposes that perspective. Both the story of Aredomi and Omario and the intertwined colonial history leave many gaps. The director fills them with vague musings and her own feelings which distract from the essential facts of which the images are a brutal reminder.
- OT: La memoria de las mariposas
- Director: Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski
- Screenplay: Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski
- Year: 2025
- Distribution | Production © Miti Films
