Documenting Peru

 

The Quechua word uyariy and the Aymara word ist’aña, both from Indigenous languages of South America, mean “to listen”. This is the title of the documentary written and directed by Peruvian-Spanish filmmaker Javier Corcuera Andrino (Lima, 1967). The feature-length documentary premiered in August 2025 at the Lima Film Festival and was named Best Peruvian Film of 2025 by the Peruvian Association of Film Critics (APRECI). During its commercial release, several cinema chains in the country screened it for only a few days.

Peru has a long tradition of documentary filmmaking. The earliest film on record is also one of the first documentaries: Los centauros peruanos (1912), directed by Jorge Goytizolo and dealing with military themes. In 1921, rubber entrepreneur Julio César Arana financed El Oriente peruano, a documentary by Portuguese filmmaker Silvino Santos, to justify the system of exploitation imposed on Amazonian communities. In 1941, German filmmaker Kurt Herrmann directed the war documentary Alerta en la frontera, about the conflict between Peru and Ecuador. In 1957, Manuel Chambi presented the ethnographic documentary Carnaval de Kanas, which gave rise to what became known as the Cusco School. Another landmark work of documentary testimony was Runan Caycu (1973), directed by Nora de Izcue, which recounts the struggles of Andean peasant communities against landowners. Miss Universo en el Perú, a documentary by Grupo Chaski about the representation of women, was released in 1982. Also worth recalling is Daniel Winitzky’s Candamo, la última selva sin hombres (1996).

At the turn of the century, environmental issues became a recurring theme, as demonstrated by Choropampa, el precio del oro (2002), by Ernesto Cabellos and Stephanie Boyd, about the mercury spill that poisoned hundreds of peasant farmers; Hija de la laguna (2015), also directed by Cabellos, which explores a community’s resistance to attempts to exploit its land for mining; and Pacificum, el retorno al océano (2017), by Mariana Tschudi, about the protection of Peru’s marine environment.

Political documentary has been another important strand. Notable examples include El caudillo pardo (2005), by Aldo Salvini, about a Peruvian man of Jewish descent with a fascist ideology; Lucanamarca (2008), by Héctor Gálvez and Carlos Cárdenas, about the massacre perpetrated by Shining Path against an Andean community; and La revolución y la tierra (2019), by Gonzalo Benavente, about the 1969 agrarian reform. Special mention should be made of the work of three women directors: Rodar contra todo (2016), by Marianela Vega, about a murderball team; De todas las cosas que se han de saber (2021), by Sofía Velázquez, about the hometown of poet César Vallejo; and La memoria de las mariposas (2025), by Tatiana Fuentes, which reconstructs the story of two Indigenous children taken to Europe during the rubber boom.

Javier Corcuera’s work belongs to this tradition. The son of poet Arturo Corcuera, he attended the film school run by Peruvian director Armando Robles Godoy after finishing secondary school. In the late 1980s, Corcuera moved to Spain, where he currently lives. He studied at the Complutense University of Madrid and graduated in Audiovisual Communication. In the second half of the 1990s, he began his career as a documentary filmmaker for television and became part of the Image Laboratory of Spain’s General Confederation of Labour (CGT).

To date, Corcuera has directed around ten feature-length documentaries. Among them, La espalda del mundo (2000) is particularly noteworthy. It interweaves three stories of human rights violations in Peru, Turkey and the United States and marked the beginning of his international career. He subsequently became one of five directors who contributed to the documentary En el mundo, a cada rato (2004), directing the segment Hijas de Belén, about three generations of women in the Amazon rainforest. Another major work in his filmography is Checkpoint Rock: Canciones desde Palestina (2009), made with Fermín Muguruza, which portrays the resistance of Palestinian musicians and poets in the face of occupation and Zionist colonialism. In 2013, Sigo siendo (Kachkaniraqmi) was released, a tribute to the music produced across Peru’s three major geographical regions: the coast, the Andes and the Amazon. In 2019, Corcuera presented El viaje de Javier Heraud, dedicated to the poet and guerrilla fighter who died at the age of 21 and was a friend of his father. His cinematic style relies on interviews, archival material and music, woven into a restrained, politically committed narrative through editing.

Uyariy focuses on the Juliaca massacre, which resulted in the deaths of 18 civilians and one police officer on 9 January 2023 near Inca Manco Cápac International Airport, amid the repression of protests against the government of President Dina Boluarte. The city of Juliaca lies on the Andean Altiplano, at an altitude of approximately 3,800 metres and about 43 kilometres from Lake Titicaca, in southeastern Peru, near the Bolivian border. It is the region’s commercial and transport hub and has a population of approximately 300,000. According to the 2025 national census, 88.3% of the city’s population identifies as belonging to an Indigenous or Native people, while only 10.7% identifies as mestizo. This is the exact opposite of the situation in Metropolitan Lima, the Peruvian capital, where 77.9% identify as mestizo and 8.6% as Indigenous.

Corcuera began filming shortly after the events, interviewing the relatives of those killed. The documentary connects this episode with the 1923 uprising in Huancho Lima, in the neighbouring province of Huancané, which was brutally suppressed by the Army and local landowners. As always, the soundtrack is another fundamental element of the film. Corcuera worked with Peruvian composer and soprano Edith Ramos, who comes from the region.

The causes of the massacre can be interpreted from two perspectives. From a short-term, conjunctural perspective, Peru’s political instability began in July 2016, when Keiko Fujimori, daughter of former dictator Alberto Fujimori, refused to accept her defeat in the presidential election against liberal candidate Pedro Pablo Kuczynski. Fujimori systematically obstructed the government through the parliamentary majority held by her party, Fuerza Popular. In March 2018, Kuczynski resigned and Vice President Martín Vizcarra took office. Tensions continued until September 2019, when Vizcarra dissolved Congress and called early parliamentary elections, held in January 2020. The new Congress was considerably more fragmented. In November of that year, amid a corruption scandal involving the COVID-19 pandemic, Parliament removed Vizcarra from office. The vacant presidency was assumed by the president of Congress, Manuel Merino, of the centre-right party Acción Popular. After five days, faced with mass demonstrations against him, Merino resigned, and the new parliamentary speaker, liberal Francisco Sagasti, assumed the presidency.

The 2021 presidential election resulted in a victory for Pedro Castillo, of the left-wing party Perú Libre, who defeated Fujimori. In December 2022, facing repeated attempts by a coalition of right-wing parties in Congress, including Fuerza Popular, to remove him from office, Castillo attempted an unsuccessful coup. After his removal and arrest, Vice President Dina Boluarte succeeded him, with the support of the parliamentary majority. Popular sectors and Indigenous communities that had supported Castillo interpreted this as a betrayal and took to the streets to express their dissent between December of that year and March 2023. Fifty civilians died during the protests and the ensuing repression by the security forces.

A constitutional complaint was filed against Boluarte by the Public Prosecutor’s Office. However, the Constitutional Court suspended the investigations in August 2025, and Parliament dismissed the complaint in September of the same year. In June 2024, the International Federation for Human Rights (FIDH) and the Association for Human Rights (APRODEH) submitted a communication to the International Criminal Court in The Hague, requesting the opening of an investigation into crimes against humanity committed during the protests.

From a long-term historical perspective, however, what happened in Juliaca was merely another link in the long chain of massacres perpetrated by the Peruvian state since the founding of the Republic, between 1821 and 1824. The elites that have governed the country—first the descendants of the Spanish invaders, the Creoles, and later mestizos who, through a process of cultural “whitening”, have become collaborators in the interests of international capitalism—have done nothing but perpetuate the regime of colonisation imposed on Indigenous territories and populations, a process that began on 12 October 1492.

Since Alberto Fujimori imposed the neoliberal model in the 1990s, the country has experienced an uninterrupted succession of social, environmental and political conflicts. The corporate-oriented democracy that emerged after his downfall has failed to resolve the growing tensions between Lima and the regions, exposing the divide between a city that concentrates political and economic power in order to exploit natural resources and ecosystems, and the people who suffer the consequences of unrestrained extractivism. With Keiko Fujimori’s presidential victory in 2026 and the new government’s submission to Donald Trump’s neo-imperialist Americas Shield project, the country’s future prospects are profoundly bleak.

Peruvian documentaries, and Corcuera’s films in particular, will surely continue to bear witness to these dark times for generations to come.