Representations of Ayacucho during the internal armed conflict in two Peruvian films

Abstract

In the last twenty years of the last century, Peru lived its biggest era of violence, which ended up with over 69,000 victims. Once the conflict was finished, filmmakers –among other cultural producers– from both the Peruvian capital and from Ayacucho –which holds the most victims– started to tell what happened during those years. The Andean city has been absent in almost all films produced in Lima, while it has been the recurrent space of films produced in Ayacucho. This approach reproduces how people lived the internal armed conflict (ICA) in the Peruvian coastal and Andean regions. In this paper, we analyze the film representation of Ayacucho in two films: Sangre inocente, directed by Palito Ortega and La última noticia, directed by Alejandro Legaspi. The city is the place where characters are and where actions that make them face the ICA take place. This work uses a qualitative method, examines the films with matrixes which enable us to identify the key elements that configure the cities as living places of the civil population during the ICA, and analyzes how films can become a cultural artifact that allows us to build memory about the past and the urban Andean inhabitants’ life during that era.