Cinema
Vuelve Sebastiana
Jorge Ruiz · 1953
Synopsis
Sebastiana, a young Chipaya shepherd girl, leads her animals across a high plateau where drought, hunger and isolation weigh on her people, who say they are descended from the chullpas. A border separates the Chipayas from the Aymaras, and the neighbouring village is forbidden to her. She goes in anyway, and forms a bond with an Aymara boy, Jesús. In her community, the yatiri is consulted, a new house is built, a llama is sacrificed. She is slow to return, and her grandfather Esteban sets out to look for her and persuade her to come back.
Context
The film runs for twenty-eight minutes; it was made with Augusto Roca, from a text by Luis Ramiro Beltrán, who is also its voice, and without state money. The roles are played by local people, a Chipaya girl and an Aymara boy, and the story mixes the codes of documentary with fiction, in a form that would later be called docu-fiction: the narrator speaks in place of the characters, translates their words and interprets their thoughts. The Nantes festival hailed it in 1992 as the first indigenous film of Latin America, and Jorge Sanjinés cited it among his antecedents.
Who it is for
In Spanish, twenty-eight minutes. The commentating voice is emphatic and dated, and almost everything the characters say passes through it.
Prizes and reception
First prize for ethnographic film at the SODRE festival in Montevideo in 1956, after a distinction from the La Paz city hall; Smithsonian Institution medal in 2006.
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