Depiction or erasure? Violence and trauma in contemporary Peruvian film

Abstract

Most of the 70,000 people who died or disappeared during the 1980–2000 civil war in Peru were Indigenous Quechua speakers. It is still proscribed to talk about the violent conflict in this Latin American country on the Pacific, where the high levels of poverty that may have triggered the war continue to affect 40% of the population. In this paper, I discuss the effort of three Peruvian films to respond to the trauma of misery, racism, forced migration, and dirty war experienced by both civilians and soldiers. I analyse how the films Gregorio (Grupo Chaski, 1984), The Lion's Den (Francisco Lombardi, 1988), and Days of Santiago (Josué Méndez, 2004) depict or erase the persons and bodies of the Andean individuals who have suffered violence.