Cinema
Bajo el sol de Loreto
Antonio Wong Rengifo · 1936
Synopsis
At the beginning of the twentieth century, on the banks of the Napo, a family of settlers sets up to produce rubber. Indians kill the couple and abduct little Olga. Years later, the expedition of a cousin who has set out to find her comes upon a young woman who lives like the people of the tribe and still wears her mother's gold medallion round her neck.
Context
Filming began in 1935, from a story written with Julio A. Baldeón; the company A. Wong y Hermano produced and distributed the film, and the director composed its title song. The style is that of the American western, with an echo of Fritz Lang's Nibelungen. The extras billed as aushiri were probably Yagua, according to the ethnographer Jean-Pierre Chaumeil. The film was long said to be in colour; the restorer Irela Núñez found neither tinting nor toning. The reels had lain in Iquitos next to an aquarium, in polystyrene crates that hastened their decay.
Who it is for
Thirty-nine silent minutes, all that survives of a print of two thousand five hundred metres; the dialogue intertitles are in Spanish, those of the narration in English.
Prizes and reception
Reconstructed by the Archivo Peruano de Imagen y Sonido, it was shown at the Pordenone silent film festival in October 2024; it is considered the major work of the Iquitos pioneer.