The document summarizes and analyzes the 2008 Peruvian film Vidas Paralelas. It was screened at the Festivalissimo film festival in Montreal. The film tells the story of two childhood friends who end up on opposing sides of Peru's conflict with the Shining Path guerilla group. It portrays the Shining Path members sympathetically and fails to acknowledge abuses by the Peruvian military. The university that produced the film saw it as telling "the other side of the story" compared to other films and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. A debate emerged after the screening between those who supported an inclusive inquiry into the war and those wanting to rewrite the past in a way that portrayed the military
The document summarizes and analyzes the 2008 Peruvian film Vidas Paralelas. It was screened at the Festivalissimo film festival in Montreal. The film tells the story of two childhood friends who end up on opposing sides of Peru's conflict with the Shining Path guerilla group. It portrays the Shining Path members sympathetically and fails to acknowledge abuses by the Peruvian military. The university that produced the film saw it as telling "the other side of the story" compared to other films and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. A debate emerged after the screening between those who supported an inclusive inquiry into the war and those wanting to rewrite the past in a way that portrayed the military
The document summarizes and analyzes the 2008 Peruvian film Vidas Paralelas. It was screened at the Festivalissimo film festival in Montreal. The film tells the story of two childhood friends who end up on opposing sides of Peru's conflict with the Shining Path guerilla group. It portrays the Shining Path members sympathetically and fails to acknowledge abuses by the Peruvian military. The university that produced the film saw it as telling "the other side of the story" compared to other films and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. A debate emerged after the screening between those who supported an inclusive inquiry into the war and those wanting to rewrite the past in a way that portrayed the military
The document summarizes and analyzes the 2008 Peruvian film Vidas Paralelas. It was screened at the Festivalissimo film festival in Montreal. The film tells the story of two childhood friends who end up on opposing sides of Peru's conflict with the Shining Path guerilla group. It portrays the Shining Path members sympathetically and fails to acknowledge abuses by the Peruvian military. The university that produced the film saw it as telling "the other side of the story" compared to other films and the Truth and Reconciliation Commission report. A debate emerged after the screening between those who supported an inclusive inquiry into the war and those wanting to rewrite the past in a way that portrayed the military
Parallel Lies?Perus Cultural Memory Battles Go International
1 Cynthia e. Milton | Universit de Montral Vidas paralelas. Directed by Roco Llad. Spanish with English subtitles. 100 minutes. Peru, 2008. Last June in Montreal, the annual Ibero-Latin American film festival, Festivalissimo, dedicated a special screening to the Peruvian film Vidas Paralelas(Parallel Lives,2008) by Roco Llad.Festival coordinators invited the director general of the film festival and the Peruvian consular general to introduce the film, and invited the rector and three of his colleagues from the Universidad Alas Peruanas (Peruvian Wings University) that produced the film to attend. After the film there was a short question period, followed by a wine reception. Having seen the previous years international success La Teta Asustada(The Milk of Sorrow, 2009), by Claudia Llosa, that won the Berlin Golden Bear for best foreign film, I expected another cinematic accounting of the war years along the same lines. Yet, Vidas Paralelas film recounts a different vision of the war, the tragedy of the abandoned soldier. The program description of this film states that Vidas Paralelas raises controversy and that it is based on a true story of two childhood friends who were separated by an attack on their highland town (Ayacucho) by the terrorist group Sendero Luminoso(SL, Shining Path). This tragic event led to each adolescent taking a different road in life: Felipe became a www.hemisphericinstitute.org | www.emisferica.org Phoca PDF military man, Sixto became a commander in SL, and they met later in life in combat. The drama of the film is heightened by a twist not mentioned in the printed description. Once the war is over and the SL captured, the remnants of Shining Path disperse into the jungle, Sixto among them. Fate is not as nice to Felipe, who ends up standing trial, accused of the death and disappearance of a SL member (Mara Nia). In the absence of her corpse, and with the weight of a truth commission report that supposedly stated Major Felipe Canos involvement in her death, Felipe is convicted of her murder. (We find out later that she too is in the jungle with Sixto and the others.) The arbitrariness and injustice of the Peruvian legal system leaves Felipe abandoned by his nation, the country that he had served to protect. The film ends with a written summary stating that during the internal conflict thousands died and that we need to know this history in order not to repeat it. The plot of the film seems to subtly reform Peruvian memory debates. Rather than deny the war, this film rewrites its script, and the role of the wars opposing armed groups (civilians appear as backdrop and self-defense groups, or ronderos, are absent). It is not difficult to make the argument that Shining Path members were villains: the Peruvian Truth and Reconciliation Commission, the CVR, condemns SL as responsible for 54% of the violence. However, it is much more difficult to make the argument that the armed forces were heroes: the CVR accords 29% and 6.6% of the documented violence to the military and police, respectively. None of the abuses committed by the armed forces comes out in the film. The only potential allusion to less than upstanding acts by the military is an oblique reference to needing a pair of cholas to keep the soldiers warm at night (chola is a racist term for Quechua-speaking women). It turns out cholas in this scene refers to hot water bottles.Vidas Paralelas was made for a Peruvian audience and seemed to be quite a blockbuster. Yet, while the quality of the images suggests good financing (from the Peruvian military), the plot is strained by several overly dramatic moments and an almost comical portrayal of SL as sex fiends that Peruvians might find the film oddly funny, rather than a cautionary tale. The discussion after the film clarified the reasons why the Universidad de Alas Peruanas decided to sign an agreement with the Peruvian military to make this film, their first foray into cinematic production.During the Q&A, the rector of the Universidad Alas Peruanas stated that this film is meant to tell the other side of the story, that is the story not told by other films that show the military as bad guys, the pro-senderista films, and the truth commission. In reference to the truth commission, the rector said, los que forman la CVR han sido muy parecidos en su ideologa a Sendero (members of CVR are similar in ideology to SL), and he stated that todays NGOs are Shining Path (son senderistas). The rector went on to inform the audience that thousands of military men are now languishing in prison as the terrorists are being let out. (The former president Alberto Fujimori is now in prison for human rights abuses, serving a 25-year sentence, the maximum penalty possible. He is, along with less well-known figures, perhaps the inspiration for the films Major Cano character. As for the released terrorists, the rector may have had in mind the American Lori Berenson who had www.hemisphericinstitute.org | www.emisferica.org Phoca PDF recently been granted parole. The rectors remarks bring us back to the 1990s of Alberto Fujimori, a period in which to speak of human rights was equated with terrorism. By fting this film, the festival organizers and the Peruvian consular general, perhaps unwittingly, supported the films and the rectors dichotomy of a cinematic field as consisting of pro versus anti SL/armed forces films. Sitting in the theatre with some of the audience aghast at the rectors comparison of the CVR and NGOs to Shining Path and some of the audience in agreement with the rector, I felt as though a microcosm of Perus present memory battles was taking place here in Montreals theatre eXcentris. 2 Two memory camps (not to be mistaken for the rectors dichotomy) were at work in the room: those in favor of the truth commission which attempted an inclusive inquiry into the internal war, and those who wanted not to overtly ignore or to forget what had happened, but rather to actively rewrite the past into one where the military were untarnished heroes, and where the root causes of the warpoverty, racism, and exclusionremain unaddressed. By attending international film festivals, the rector may have been trying to counteract the international impact of Claudia Llosas film, thus, asking us unfairly to equate Teta Asustada with Vidas Paralelasas parallel interventions into the past. That is, Perus memory battles have gone international, using film festivals as a forum. Film and art in general is the present battlefield for memory in Peru and abroad. The rewriting of the war years by the present government is yielding a subtle narrative (more subtle than that of Vidas Paralelas): yes, there was an atrocious war that cost many innocent lives and is a national tragedy. Yet, there are no lessons to be learned, other than not to repeat it. The quasi-denialist rewriting of the war years is one that seeks to reaffirm the armed forces without reforming the institution that seeks to pretend a democracy and a peace that does not acknowledge the thousands of common graves upon which Peruvians walk, and the root causes of poverty, racism and exclusion that lay the groundwork for continued discontent. Cynthia E. Milton works on history in the Andes, in particular on historical representations of violence in contemporary Peru and perceptions of poverty in colonial Ecuador. She is the author ofThe Many Meanings of Poverty: Colonialism, Social Compacts, and Assistance in 18th Century Ecuador (Stanford: Stanford University Press, 2007), winner of the Bolton-Johnson Prize of the Conference on Latin American History for the best work on Latin America published in 2007, a co-editor ofThe Art of Truth-telling about Authoritarian Rule (Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 2005) and ofCurating Difficult Knowledge: violent pasts in public places. New York: Palgrave Macmillan, forthcoming). She has written several articles on historical clarification in post-Shining Path Peru. She is an associate professor and Canada Research Chair in Latin American History in the Department of History at the Universit de Montral. Notes www.hemisphericinstitute.org | www.emisferica.org Phoca PDF 1 I wish to thank Benny Chueca, Alberto Vergara, and Alfredo Villar for their discussions on this film. 2 Some of this debate is evident in the posted comments on the YouTube trailer.
www.hemisphericinstitute.org | www.emisferica.org Phoca PDF