What is it that makes Peruvian cinema of the twenty-first century distinctive and why is it worth exploring? Historically, Peru has not been renowned for its cinematic strength, and many still argue that its filmic ecosystem lacks a coherent infrastructure. Nevertheless, Peruvian cinema has recently experienced significant shifts that respond to, reflect, and in many ways challenge what is happening within its broader societal landscape. Key national scholars and critics (and contributors to this collection) Ricardo Bedoya (2015, p. 73) and Emilio Bustamante (Bustamante and Luna Victoria, 2017, p. 17) have written that whereas throughout the twentieth-century, Peruvian cinema was mostly produced and seen in Lima, the first two decades of the twenty-first century have decentered film production and spectatorship toward the rest of the country to become more genuinely national.1 Moreover, many Peruvian films are achieving global visibility on the festival and art cinema circuits as well as via online platforms, such that the concept of Peruvian cinema has become part of a broader conversation within the field of Latin American film studies to do with interdisciplinarity and transnationality. In the context of film production, Peruvian directors such as Claudia Llosa, Melina LeĂłn, and Alvaro Delgado Aparicio have become increasingly visible on the global stage. Furthermore, as evidence that this dynamism is not restricted to market-oriented products and processes, regional, community-based, and experimental filmmaking has significantly expanded within the last twenty years with directors like Palito Ortega Matute, Eduardo Quispe AlarcĂłn, and Lorena Best challenging and expanding traditional cinematic practices. In sharp contrast with the state of the field only a couple of decades ago, nowadays Peruvian cinema is marked by its ample diversity.
This book, the first English-language collection of essays on Peruvian cinema, takes as its starting point the growth of cinematic production in the country during the first two decades of the twenty-first century. We wish to tie this significant upsurge to the conclusion of the twenty-year war (1980â2000) between the state and the insurgent group Sendero Luminoso [Shining Path], which gave way to the reinvention of the country within a neoliberal agenda and deliberately and prominently inserted Peru into the global marketplace. This process included changes across the whole landscape of Peruvian societyâeconomic, political, cultural, and technological. Economically, a significant rise in the number of people who belong to the middle classes occurred, with the poverty rate falling from 52.2% in 2005 to 26.1% in 2013.2 During the centuryâs first decade, what has been called the âPeruvian miracleâ refers to an extraordinary economic performance which displayed an annual growth of 6.1% of its GDP between 2003 and 2013, a period then followed by a slowdown to an annual average rate of 3.2% between 2014 and 2018, mainly as a result of the lowering of international commodity prices. Nevertheless, even the unprecedented macroeconomic surge, especially during the first decade, was in many ways divorced from the general welfare of Peruvians at the micro level of everyday life, and was also accompanied by one of neoliberalismâs systemic features: the persistence of high levels of inequality. In addition, the vulnerabiity and fragility of the emerging middle classes has been made dramatically evident in the economic crisis resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, which has also revealed that, in spite of solid economic reserves, urgently needed investment in key sectors like health was scandalously neglected.
Politically, in the late twentieth century, the return to democracy which began in a highly precarious way with the elections of 19803 and was then interrupted by Alberto Fujimoriâs dissolution of Congress in 1992, was reconfirmed in 2000 with the transitional government of ValentĂn Paniagua (2000â2001), followed by the election of Alejandro Toledo (2001â2006). Democratically elected governments have continued ever since (Alan GarcĂa 2006â2011; Ollanta Humala 2011â2016; Pedro Pablo Kuczynski 2016â2018),4 although corruption and criminality among elected officials have been an endemic dysfunction throughout this period, undermining the effectiveness and the meaning of democracy in the country. The fact that every single president elected since 2000 has been subject to criminal investigations or actual charges for massive corruption schemes is only one of the many faces of a highly chaotic political scenario. In the last twenty years, Peruâs systemic political precariousness and institutional weaknesses have also been fed by a debilitating lack of solid political parties, by politicians who fail to represent and respond to popular demands, and by a postpolitical cynicism which views successful economic performance at the macro level as the sole recipe for national development. In relation to this, unremitting political instability has resulted from the national economyâs acute dependence on the demands of the mining industries. In this respect, the management of local resources has been the source of persistent political conflict between indigenous and locally organized groups and foreign conglomerates backed by the state.
A further example of how massive corruption has eroded the most basic levels of political stability is evidenced by further significant upheavals within the government sphere. In March 2018, Peruâs then president (Pedro Pablo Kuczynski) resigned when secret deals between his party and politicians from the opposition were discovered in an attempt to avert a Congress-led motion for presidential vacancy. MartĂn Vizcarra, the second vice president, was then sworn into power for the remainder of the presidential period, that is, until 2021. Vizcarraâs projects of political reform, aimed at attacking corruption and strengthening the countryâs institutions, faced extraordinary levels of obstruction from Congress in spite of being supported by 85% of the population. As a result, in September 2019 Vizcarra dissolved Congress and called for new elections for short term legislators which were held in January 2020. In addition, further accusations of corruption resulted in a failed attempt by the newly elected Congress to oust Vizcarra in September 2020.
On the sociocultural and technological fronts, since the beginning of the new century, continuing urbanization and greater access to digital infrastructure in remote parts of the country have resulted in both an increased westernization of perspectives and a greater visibility of cultural production from different parts of the country. Nevertheless, tensions clearly remain about the balance of power and agency between the different groups that constitute the Peruvian nation, and the centralization of Peruvian culture around Lima continues to be an obstacle. On the one hand, small steps have been taken toward a more inclusive sense of national pride that encompasses greater symbolic acknowledgement of non-white identities and recognition of Peruâs diverse cultural heritage. On the other, Marca PerĂș, a broad government-sponsored nation-branding project that is discussed in one of the chapters in this collection, has become the hegemonic focus of discussion about the national, and operates as a technology of subjectivation stemming from late capitalismâs market logics (CĂĄnepa Koch and Lossio ChĂĄvez 2019, pp. 17, 20). As a call to a renewed form of citizenship centered on emphasizing personal and national achievement as the opportunity to rebuild the countryâs reputation both internally and on a global scale, Marca PerĂș has established itself as a public and moral project of âentrepreneurial epicâ that governs many aspects of the lives of Peruvians (2019, p. 26). Following the logic of branding, Marca PerĂș has recuperated and channelled diversity, but it has also aestheticized and monetized it, limiting its possibilities of fostering a deep and significant transformation toward a more democratic society (2019, p. 29).
As far as technological advancement is concerned, the complex connectivity and âglobal-spatial proximityâ (Tomlinson 1999, p. 3) between Peruvians and the outside world (through the widespread use of cell phones and the internet) has had an enormous effect on the way Peruvians conduct and define their lives both personally and professionally. As Kapur and Wagner have argued, referring to the global dimensions of the technological revolution, the ânew technologies of communication have served as the glue and conduit of neoliberalism,â that is to say, the medium through which neoliberalism embeds itself into our everyday lives (2011, p. 1). Certainly, this has been the experience for a large number of Peruvians for whom the persistent cultural distances have been, to a certain extent, disrupted, blurred, and complicated by technology.
Neoliberalism in Peru
In our desire to contextualize twenty-first-century Peruvian cinema within the transformations brought about by neoliberalism, we acknowledge that since the 1990s, Peru has been one of the several Latin American sites of experimentation for neoliberal reforms propelled âfrom aboveâ (Gago 2017, p. 2). However, as Gago has pointed out, Foucaultâs concept of governmentality allows us to understand neoliberalism as a set of skills, technologies, and practices which reveal a rationality that cannot be thought of only from above, but need to be considered as also coming from below (2017, p. 2). As âa variety of ways of doing, being and thinking that organize the social machineryâs calculations and effects,â the way that neoliberalism has unfolded in Peru provides quite a concrete example of how this rationality âis not purely abstract nor macropolitical but rather arises from the encounter with forces at work and is embodied in various ways by the subjectivities and tactics of everyday lifeâ (Gago 2017, p. 2). In that sense, beyond its political implementation by the government, the ways in which neoliberalism has become rooted in popular subjectivities in places like Peru attests to a complex, immanent, and nonlinear functioning where it is âsimultaneously contemporary and contested, reinterpreted and innovatedâ as well as âappropriated, destroyed, relaunched, and altered by those who, it assumes, are only its victimsâ (Gago 2017, p. 234).
As an example of the multiple ways through which neoliberal technologies of power operate, the ideology of entrepreneurship normalized in the country at the macro and micro levels since 1990 presents itself as an opportunity for everyone, reinforcing what since the early twentieth century has been a heroic narrative that understands migration as the first path for economic prosperity. As a âvitalist pragmatic,â the social, cultural, and economic transformations brought by migration can then be understood as one of the ways in which neoliberalism from below reveals itself as âa powerful popular economy that combines community skills of self-management and intimate know-how as a technology of mass self-entrepreneurshipâ (Gago 2017, p. 6). In Peru, the intense process of urbanization that has continued into the twenty-first century has resulted in a sprawling growth of cities, mostly along the coast but also elsewhere throughout the country, where the emblematic mall-plus-multiplex phenomenon has become the familiar site of an urban consumer culture shaped by the neoliberal expectations and specific habits of the growing middle classes. Indeed, as GarcĂa Canclini pointed out back in 1995, since the early 1990s citizenship and...