This is a film that was heavily criticized by the Peruvian government. Their argument being that it was a pro-terrorist film because it defended the terrorist militia group The Shining Path. Are the criticisms correct? Is the film a defense of a terrible terrorist organization? Or is there more nuance below the surface in ‘La Piel Más Temida’?

There is one thing that animates the film, and that is violence. Violence sits at the center of this community. It exists as a bane that they must carry, willingly or unwillingly. It has been forced onto them.

It is a film about the pain of being an adult. Being an adult is horrifying, and by horrifying I am talking about horror as an indescribable dread that fills your very physical being.

It is easy to criticize the institution for what it does wrong, but the institution still exists. Why? Because an institution’s primary objective is to defend itself, and to uphold itself. It’s a fact we take for granted.

I have decided to take this opportunity to tell the story of Our Lady of Guadalupe, but not the one you might remember or know about. This is the true story of Our Lady of Guadalupe.

To understand how love and compassion are the beating hearts of this film, consider what happens after Azul dumps the ashes of her mother into the sea.

The film is an attempt to explore and explain abuse that the director herself had felt in her life, both in the workplace and elsewhere. It’s a common experience for women.

In film actors work with images. It’s both their job and their tool of work. And yet the image is not the actor, and the actor is not the image. This dualism of image and reality reminded me of Jean Baudrillard’s idea of: “the territory is not the map”. The representation is not the thing itself, but it does replace the thing.

The film is more interested on the assumed male suffering caused by women than it is on the real suffering felt by women.

The characters of these films find comfort in the world of the dead. In some way it’s the only world they can understand, and vice versa the only world that understands them.

Flora Tristan teaches us that if women are the proletariat of the proletariat than they uphold the proletariat. Without the proletariat to uphold the proletariat the whole system comes crumbling down. Quite literally women uphold the whole system.

It is a film that is explicitly about the legacy and heritage of a genocide. It is about the consequences of a dictatorship. And in particular what dictatorships leave behind. It’s also about processing the trauma of the baggage of a dictatorship. And the baggage is immense.

In ‘Hija’, Juana uses water to forgive herself, growing away from her mistakes so she can be a happier and more fulfilled person. In ‘Armas Blancas’, water symbolizes the growth that faces Vale in her life ahead.

The documentary is about ‘the inconclusive independence’. I don’t really like that translation. I would rather have translated it as: ‘the ongoing exploitation’, or ‘the unfinished independence’.

Memory is not some objective auto-conclusive retelling of a lived experience. Rather, memory is like a process. It is in a constant state of reproduction. Memory is built through our continued interaction with the past, whether that be through retelling it or by swimming through the myriad detritus that the past leaves behind.