Song Without a Name ( Melina León, 2019): Peru | Spain | USA | Chile

Reviewed by: Gordon Gerbitz, Viewed at AFI Fest 2019

If you get the chance, I strongly recommend you see Song Without a Name.  The  award  winning Peruvian director Melina Leon,  along with amazing  black and white cinematography of Into Briones captures hearts with a debut film that shows how easily young indigenous women are marginalized, manipulated and discriminated against by society.  Facing hardships beyond comprehension,  we follow Georgina, a Quechuan 20 year old unwed pregnant mother as  she takes the long, bumpy bus journeys to a fictitious non-descriptive phony medical clinic in Lima. Peru.  A riveting performance by Pamela Mendoza, the pain of Geo as she delivers a baby girl on an inadequate delivery table.  Exhausted by the experience she is told to sleep on the uncomfortable table.  When she awakes the baby is gone and she is forced out of the dilapidated office space by the unqualified staff..  Childless Geo struggles to get help to find her child. from an indifferent and unjust bureaucratic system of discrimination.  Her 1988 story, based on similar events during the tumultuous 7,500% hyper inflation plaguing the  first non-consecutive term of corrupt  President Alan Garcia (1985–90; 2006–11).  The corruption and scandal laden Trumpian former President of Peru admitted receiving massive construction payoffs of 800 million or more under both his terms.  As a unrelated side note to this film, facing second term arrest warrants, Garcia committed suicide on April 17th, 2019.  While Geo and her live-in boyfriend Leo pass a wall in their village, graffiti is painted on the white wall of a local building denouncing Alan Garcia for causing unbearable economic hardship and deadly violence against the Indigenous communities in Peru.  Another white wall has “Shinning Path” propaganda.  Her boyfriend/husband Leo,  initially tried to help Geo report the abduction.   Latter her suspicions of Leo are confirmed, he is  involved with the resistance Maoist terrorist group “The Shinning Path”.   She witnesses Leo involved in  bombing a village festival procession.   He is arrested leaving Geo alone and homeless.

The childless Geo struggles with post-part depression and the voicelessness of female poverty and marginalization in the Americas.   Into Brioness’s brilliant cinematography often features the still shots of a closed doors Geo encounters in her search for answers and her baby girl.   The heavily sloped, sand dune extolled, extreme desert winds are beautiful stark landscapes that illustrate the other worldly taxation this extols on Geo and Leo.

Long enduring colonialism is a pattern repeated in this film as well as in the 2019 Argentine movie Family Matters, also seen by this reviewer at the 2019 AFI Fest Film Festival in Hollywood, California.   Centuries of colonialism create stark income equality, hyper inflation, stifling bureaucracy and forced austerity imposed from the outside World Bank.  Once again, facing closed doors, Geo strongly and stubbornly inserts herself into the press room of the large, influential Lima news paper called La Reforma.  With old fashion typewriters loud cracking, staff try to remove Geo.  As Geo stoically plants her body like a tree in the office, her loud complaints get the attention of the newspaper editor.  The editor assigns, a shy suited reporter named Pedro ( Tommy Párraga) , a young Lou Diamond Phillips look a like.  Suited Pedro and villager Geo live in worlds apart but Pedro reluctantly and valiantly takes the case by going around doors that would be closed to indigenous women.   Creatively greasing the palms of reluctant sources with quiet machismo, Pedro’s resourcefulness cajoles big and little egos alike.

Despite Pedro getting leads as far away as the Amazon and even cracking a story about the same criminal gang offering cash for babies.  His story shakes the corridors of power in Lima  However, Pedro is side swept into a subplot about his hidden homosexuality when he meets his opposite,  a Thespian named Isa (Maykol Hernandez).   Closeted Pedro and expressive Isa must dance around the powerfully forbidding norms that supress gay expressions of love in institutionally Catholic Peru.  Just as Geo encountered colonialist discrimination for her gender and ancestry, Pedro encounters homophobic hate and manipulative extortion for his sexuality.  For those familiar with Gay cinema in Peru the subplot and burgeoning gay relationship is destroyed by societal norms  ala films like “Don’t Tell Anyone” and “Undertow”.

Mystic ancestral music of  this film is rich in indigenous ceremony, traditional costumed and haunting music of the mountainous Inca peoples.  Geo can be found in the company of her friends singing songs of suffering, acceptance of the gravity of environments,  indigenous optomism in spite of pain.  Geo’s therapy of acceptance is to sing to her lost daughter,  in her native Quechuan, a lullaby of hope and a better life.