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<\/a>If you get the chance, I strongly recommend you see Song Without a Name.\u00a0\u00a0The\u00a0 award\u00a0 winning Peruvian director\u00a0Melina\u00a0Leon,\u00a0 along with amazing\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Facing hardships beyond comprehension,\u00a0 we follow\u00a0Georgina, a Quechuan\u00a020 year old unwed pregnant mother as\u00a0 she takes the long, bumpy bus journeys to a fictitious non-descriptive\u00a0phony medical clinic in Lima. Peru.\u00a0 A riveting performance by\u00a0Pamela Mendoza,\u00a0the pain of Geo as she delivers a baby girl on an inadequate delivery table.\u00a0 Exhausted by the experience she is told to sleep on the uncomfortable table.\u00a0 When she awakes the baby is gone and she is forced out of the dilapidated\u00a0office space by the unqualified staff..\u00a0 Childless Geo struggles to get help to find her child. from an indifferent and unjust bureaucratic system of discrimination.\u00a0 Her 1988 story, based on similar events during the tumultuous 7,500% hyper inflation plaguing the\u00a0 first non-consecutive term of corrupt\u00a0 President Alan Garcia\u00a0(1985\u201390; 2006\u201311).\u00a0 The corruption and scandal laden\u00a0Trumpian former President of Peru admitted receiving massive construction payoffs of 800 million or more under both his terms.\u00a0 As a unrelated side note to this film, facing second term arrest warrants, Garcia committed suicide on April 17th, 2019.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 Another white wall has “Shinning Path” propaganda.\u00a0 Her boyfriend\/husband Leo,\u00a0\u00a0initially tried to help Geo report the abduction.\u00a0 \u00a0Latter her suspicions of Leo are confirmed, he is\u00a0 involved with the resistance Maoist terrorist group “The Shinning Path”.\u00a0 \u00a0She witnesses Leo involved in\u00a0 bombing a village festival procession.\u00a0 \u00a0He is arrested leaving Geo alone and homeless.<\/p>\nThe childless Geo struggles with post-part depression and the voicelessness of female poverty and marginalization in the Americas.\u00a0 \u00a0Into Brioness’s brilliant cinematography often features the still shots of a closed doors Geo encounters in her search for answers and her baby girl.\u00a0 \u00a0The heavily sloped, sand dune extolled, extreme desert winds are beautiful stark landscapes that illustrate the other worldly taxation this extols on Geo and Leo.<\/p>\n
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.\u00a0 \u00a0Centuries of colonialism create stark income equality, hyper inflation, stifling bureaucracy and forced austerity imposed from the outside World Bank.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 With old fashion typewriters loud cracking, staff try to remove Geo.\u00a0 As Geo stoically plants her body like a tree in the office, her loud complaints get the attention of the newspaper editor.\u00a0 The editor assigns, a shy suited reporter named Pedro ( Tommy P\u00e1rraga) , a young Lou Diamond Phillips look a like.\u00a0 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.\u00a0 \u00a0Creatively greasing the palms of reluctant sources with quiet machismo, Pedro’s resourcefulness cajoles big and little egos alike.<\/p>\n
Despite Pedro getting leads as far away as the Amazon and even cracking a story about the same criminal gang offering cash for babies.\u00a0 His story shakes the corridors of power in Lima\u00a0 However, Pedro is side swept into a subplot about his hidden homosexuality when he meets his opposite,\u00a0 a Thespian named Isa (Maykol Hernandez).\u00a0 \u00a0Closeted Pedro and expressive Isa must dance around the powerfully forbidding norms that supress gay expressions of love in institutionally Catholic Peru.\u00a0 Just as Geo encountered colonialist discrimination for her gender and ancestry, Pedro encounters homophobic hate and manipulative extortion for his sexuality.\u00a0 For those familiar with Gay cinema in Peru the subplot and burgeoning gay relationship is destroyed by societal norms\u00a0 ala films like “Don’t Tell Anyone” and “Undertow”.<\/p>\n
Mystic ancestral music of\u00a0 this film is rich in indigenous ceremony, traditional costumed and haunting music of the mountainous Inca peoples.\u00a0 Geo can be found in the company of her friends singing songs of suffering, acceptance of the gravity of environments,\u00a0\u00a0indigenous optomism in spite of pain.\u00a0\u00a0Geo’s therapy of acceptance is to sing to her lost daughter,\u00a0 in her native Quechuan, a lullaby of hope and a better life.<\/p>\n
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Reviewed by: Gordon Gerbitz, Viewed at AFI Fest 2019 If you get the chance, I strongly recommend you see Song Without a Name.\u00a0\u00a0The\u00a0 award\u00a0 winning Peruvian director\u00a0Melina\u00a0Leon,\u00a0 along with amazing\u00a0 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 […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":247813,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[369,3],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-45024","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-afi-filmfest-2019","category-films"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45024","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/247813"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=45024"}],"version-history":[{"count":11,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45024\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":45504,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/45024\/revisions\/45504"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=45024"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=45024"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/studentfilmreviews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=45024"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}