Peruvian director Leonardo Barbuy and his producer Illari Orcottoma Mendoza came to present the fiction feature film Diogenes, in competition at the Rencontres Cinélatino in Toulouse. A drama...Cinélatino: Leonardo Barbuy revisits the myth of Diogenes in the Peruvian Andes Santiago and Sabina, the brother and sister, are the children of Diogenes in Leonardo Barbuy's film presented in the fiction feature film competition at the Rencontres Cinélatino in Toulouse. © Cinélatino 2023 Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec 7 min Peruvian director Leonardo Barbuy and his producer Illari Orcottoma Mendoza

Cinélatino: Leonardo Barbuy revisits the myth of Diogenes in the Peruvian Andes

Santiago and Sabina, the brother and sister, are the children of Diogenes in Leonardo Barbuy's film presented in the fiction feature film competition at the Rencontres Cinélatino in Toulouse. © Cinélatino 2023

Text by: Isabelle Le Gonidec

7 min

Peruvian director Leonardo Barbuy and his producer Illari Orcottoma Mendoza came to present the fiction feature film Diogenes, in competition at the Rencontres Cinélatino in Toulouse. A drama and a family chronicle beautifully filmed in the region of Ayacucho, in the Andes. On a ridge thread between fiction and documentary, the camera focuses on the daily life of a father and his two children, protected by a pack of dogs.

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from our special envoy in Toulouse,

Diogenes of Sinope, the Greek, the original, nicknamed "the dog or "the cynic", was an outsider who lived far from the community of men. We owe him a sentence passed to posterity, recalls Leonardo Barbuy: the more I know men, the more I love my dog ... Our Diogenes in the film also lives far from the world, in an isolated cottage on the mountainside. He is a craftsman who paints tablas, in real life and in the film (by candlelight), who raises his two children alone, in real life and in the film. These tablas (literally boards) are works painted on agave bark (maguey) that tell the daily life or extraordinary facts that the community lives. Literally, the director and producer explain, their Quechua name means something like "telling memory." The municipality of Sarhua, in the Ayacucho region, where the film was shot, is known for this art and the desire to work with this community was decisive in the development of the film project. Prior to the writing of the screenplay, there was an anthropological research work on life in this region, its legends and rituals.

A community hit, like the whole region, by the violence of the armed conflict in Peru, opposing the army to the Shining Path. Between 1980 and 2000, Peru experienced an internal armed conflict that resulted in more than 70,000 deaths and 20,000 missing. In the house of Diogenes, the camera lingers on some of his works. We see masked and armed men in the middle of the peasants. Two of them drag a woman by these long braids worn by Quechua Indians. We are in an adobe house with a tin roof, built for the needs of the film on land rented to the community. The film crew had to transport equipment, water, food, etc., on steep paths that we can easily imagine watching the children trudging on these vertiginous slopes.

Diógenes is the first fiction feature film by Leonardo Barbuy La Torre, for which he is also a screenwriter and for which he composed the music. © Cinélatino 2023

At the heart of Quechua culture

In this community, all the inhabitants speak Quechua, tell us the director Leonardo Barbuy and his producer Illari Orcottoma Mendoza (Mosaico), who arrived in Toulouse already crowned with the Biznaga Silver Awards for Best Ibero-American Film and Biznaga Silver for Best Director at the Malaga Festival in Spain. It should also be noted that this feature film is also from Cinélatino's Cinéma en construction: last year it won the special mention of the Grand Prix Cinéma en construction, a nice journey already. The actors - non-professionals - are all bilingual and Leonardo Barbuy says he left them a wide margin of maneuver in the exchanges so that they appropriate them with their culture, he himself not being a speaker of Quechua had written his script in Castilian. I wouldn't say it like that to my children, suggested Jorge Pomacanchari, who plays the father, suggesting another way of saying...

Leonardo Barbuy's film arrived in Toulouse after winning two awards at the Malaga Film Festival in Spain. http://mosaico.pe/

Jorge Pomacanchari accompanied the film from the very beginning of the process in 2016, and it is impressive by the strength it exudes, especially in the magnetic gaze in front of the camera. Here, life is harsh and bare, like the interior of this house where we light ourselves with a kerosene lamp. The scene of the meal where one can hardly see the bowls on which scarves of thick smoke are unrolled, would not have been denied by the real Diogenes of Sinope. Some still images, however, show us the village community dressed in its beautiful finery for a ceremony: magnificence of the costumes in view of the simplicity of everyday life. Poses, without folklorism, reminiscent of the photographs of Martin Chambi, the famous Andean photographer.

A sumptuous black and white photograph

The historical context of this past violence explains, perhaps, the voluntary isolation of Diogenes, with his large dogs - which protect the small family - and his children: a little boy, Santiago, who plays like all the little boys of the countryside to tear off the legs of the beetles, while his older sister, Sabina, tells him Indian legends of monsters in the hollow of the ear and would like to accompany his father to the village to sell the paintings. He refuses on the grounds that she is too innocent... Children are first cousins in real life and complicity operates on screen. The village, we see it little, on the other hand the mountain, the bare flanks of the Andes, the brush, the rocks, filmed in black and white, are sumptuous. The great eucalyptus trees ripple in the wind and the soundtrack, created by the director who is also a composer, accompanies the mystery and power of this nature. Two cinematographers worked on the image, Mateo Guzman and Musuk Nolte. The latter, a photographer who still works in black and white and who knows the Andes well, has just been awarded at the World Press Photo, (for a photo on the oil spill in Peru), says Leonardo Barbuy.

When we suggest to the director that his film is as much fiction and documentary, he claims to be Victor Erice: the only fiction is the "I", assures the Spanish director... These are convenient categories for film festivals, but in cinema there is a strong interpenetration between the two, as the creative process is always marked by subjectivity. Remarks also made in Toulouse by Ignacio Agüero and Tatiana Huezo (to whom producer Illari Orcottoma Mendoza pays a vibrant tribute). The film opens with a kind of ceremony, the cremation of one of the family's dogs... we will not reveal how it ends, but the director and his producer remind us of the situation of great instability in which Peru has found itself in recent years with the waltz of presidents, the trials for corruption, the discrimination of which Indians are victims and the recent demonstrations against President Boluarte, violently repressed...

► READ ALSO: In Peru, President Boluarte heard for the bloody repression of demonstrations

Two days ago, the Museum of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion was closed in Miraflores, for technical reasons, while Amnesty International was due to submit its annual report there. A whole context that makes films like Diogenes all the more necessary. A beautiful tribute to these communities and a beautiful film in short.

► The website of the Cinélatino festival

Cinélatino: Leonardo Barbuy revisits the myth of Diogenes in the Peruvian Andes

Cinélatino: Leonardo Barbuy revisits the myth of Diogenes in the Peruvian Andes

At the heart of Quechua culture

A sumptuous black and white photograph

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