By: Blake Simons
Photo: Mary Jiménez (right) and co-director Bénédicte Liénard, credit: Victor Idrogo. Fuga poster
During the ‘Dirty War’ in Peru (1970-2000), the terrorist group ‘Shining Path’ carried out homophobic attacks, but this is not widely known.
Docufiction filmmakers Mary Jiménez and Bénédicte Liénard have a history of exploring injustice, discrimination, and supressed identity in their joint films. Their latest work, Fugue, returns to many of the ideas and motifs in their preceding film, By the Name of Tania, here exploring the stories of queer people that were persecuted by the Tupac Amaru and Shining Path terrorist groups during this period.
At the centre of this cinematic translation is queer artist Saor Sax (she/her), who carries a fictional lover, ‘Valentina’ in a coffin for burial. Valentina’s queer history is a secret to many, but her history with the terrorist group is a secret even to Saor. This journey’s meditative tempo and dreamlike images of past made present are striking and recall the work of Apichatpong Weerasethakul. Through transformed testimony, spoken monologue, and the participation of locals as non-professional actors, Jiménez and Liénard cinematically explore what has previously gone unexplored and unarticulated.
Mary Jiménez is friendly and warm as we talk over Zoom. She’s in a study, cloistered by books. One gets the sense of a well-read filmmaker heavy with knowledge, one who knows that such histories shouldn’t remain restricted to the realm of scholars and historians.
Why did you personally want to tell this story? And why did you feel that it was now time for these histories to be told?
Well, me and my partner, we have a story of shame and persecution. Not as strong, of course, but it's something that is close to us.
When we were shooting our previous film, By the Name of Tania, we were in Iquitos. And we realised that Iquitos was a town full of gay people. Much more than in Lima or much more than any other place in Peru. We asked, why is it like that? And they said, well, because there was a persecution by Shining Path.
The people escaped through the river to this town, because Iquitos is a town that you can't reach by road. It's completely isolated, you have to go there by plane or river. The terrorists never got there. And so it's created a town which is quite free, where you see trans people that are twelve, thirteen, fourteen years old with their mothers. It's very nice. You don't feel any kind of repression, it's a very festive place. We went to ask around. Is it true that there was a persecution? How did it happen?
Because in the museum of the memory, the memory of the conflict [‘Place of Memory, Tolerance and Social Inclusion’, in Lima], this war that happened is called the ‘Dirty War’, between the government army and Shining Path. There is nothing about [this persecution]. My interpretation is that it’s because they are still homophobic. And so, there was nothing in there.
We went to ask. There was only a small article about the Gardenia shooting, which still- it was so particular and so big that it figures in a little press thing, you know, the rest doesn't. There was nothing else.
So we went to the Huallaga River valley, which is very big, and we started asking questions to people that were related to that. From one to another, from one to another.
Then we chose some of them, and we went back with Saor, who plays the main character, so that she could also hear. Because she didn't know anything about this persecution. I mean, it's been hidden completely. She came with us and went to one after the other, all these people. We recorded the interviews, and she wrote them because she writes quite well. She wrote everything to have a reference from which to build the character.
We, with Bénédicte, decided to create a character, this shaman played by Saor, because we wanted people to experience the testimonies through an emotional window, and not just have people tell the stories. We decided that he was going to bury someone, the fictional part to envelop the testimonies appeared. Because someone has died, it allows us to work in a realm between dream and memories.
Still from Fuga (2024)
Wonderful. Those are really beautiful insights that unlock the film more for me.
Can you tell me more about casting Saor Sax? Because you met Saor on your previous film, and then you cast her for this.
Saor is an artist and we knew of her existence. We thought we could use her as our character, but it was not certain. We came here three times to investigate. The second time we did some tests with her, and with Fiorella, who was our trans actor in the film before. The difficulty of this character is that characters are always in action, but this is a character who is in reaction. He has no action whatsoever. So, he has to be like a sponge, you know, receiving the stories, listening, not doing anything. She had to build a lot of background about Valentina. This is why we took her to write. She lives in Yurimaguas and writes small books about her memories also.
We went six months before the shoot to start working with the characters that we had chosen, with Dimas and Miguel and Willy, to make them able to do things and speak, because it's difficult for them, you know. They are vulnerable people, they have nothing to do with representation of themselves. We rehearsed a lot and used techniques that we learned from Stella Adler, building background in an imaginary way, even with their own stories, adding things to make it alive in the present. We did this with everyone.
The shoot was quite long. It was eleven weeks, because it was also in a place where there’s a lot of rain. We had to be able to switch from this to that.
What attracts you to working in this hybrid mode of fiction and documentary together? I think the synthesis of the two in this film is very effective.
I think reality always has things that you can't imagine, things that are beyond your small imagination as a single human being. It enriches a fiction. It’s a way of enlarging the scope of what you do.
And from the other side, from the side of documentary or films that have to do with reality, fiction gives a punch, it gives a window. It gives another kind of interest, another kind of emotional relationship to the audience that allows them to fully experience what we would like them to experience.
And we've been doing this from film to film. We started with Glowing Embers, then By the Name of Tania. This one is a little more fictional, mainly because we didn't want to work with a script. Normally what you do is you write a script and a working plan, and then the producer thinks you can do it in six, seven weeks. We didn't want to have any plan. We knew we should do this, that, that, that. It was open to changes and long takes, which is what we like more, because we like to work with time.
I think time is the secret in a film, and we like time to stop at some point. Like when he's looking at the wall, or when he's calling Valentina, or the moments where you slow down and then suddenly everything is fixed and it's like, wow, what happens? I think this brings the audience very present to the room in which they are watching, so it gives another dimension additional to the normal narrative time that you can capture in a scene, where things are cut into pieces for narrative content to work.
We tried to take away all the expectations and projections that the audience might have about what will happen, because if you create a film where [the focus is] what will happen, will he kill her or not, etc., then the time is compressed into the question. Here you don't know anything. You are in the same position as Saor, who knows nothing about her, even if he knew her.
I really love that element of the film, how you play with time. Because you're exploring the past, but you don't treat it as something that is a fixed moment. You're exploring it in a fluid way, but very much grounding it in the present. I think that interplay is interesting.
Well, that was the decision, to make a film about the past, but to bring the past to the present. Yeah. I think a character allows you to do that because they have memory, you know, and it's within their own mind that this past comes forth in the present. It was a very conscious choice.
Could you tell me more about casting non-professional actors from local communities and incorporating testimony in the film?
Well, there was the people of the town, there was that kind of casting, yes. But also the people who we chose the stories of, who are not cast, they are the ones that experienced it.
We stayed in that town so much that we started to know everyone. But, for instance, the guy with the gun who carries the rifle in the beginning, he was a real terrorist.
When we met everyone when we arrived, Miguel asked us if we wanted to meet the terrorist. We met him and we talked with him several times and we asked him ‘Would you mind doing a homophobic scene?’. And he says, ‘I like that, no problem’. He enjoyed doing it. We told him, ‘Yeah, but you're going to be the bad character in the film because it is a film against that’, but he didn't mind, you know. So that was a very natural casting. The others are people we met in the town, drivers and people walking here and there.
Thinking on what you were saying about fusing past and present into one continuous present, and also what you were saying about casting a terrorist, your film brought to mind Joshua Oppenheimer's work a lot. The Look of Silence especially came to mind a lot watching this film.
I was curious because those films similarly reckon with past genocide and the people whose lives have been affected by that. Were you conscious of that film when you made Fuga? And were there other films that influenced your approach?
I have seen The Act of Killing, yes. But I have not seen the other one.
The other one, I would recommend it. It achieves similar to what you've achieved in your film. It's fascinating to view the two side by side.
I will have to watch.
I find it very poetic and moving how you capture so much of this violent past through the repeat visual of this single coffin.
We have a character who is fictitious but represents so much and is in turn represented by a motionless coffin that you keep centring on screen. I wondered if you could tell me more about foregrounding the visual of the coffin.
Well, in the beginning, we wanted it to be more there. The travelling of Saor with the coffin was longer, we cut it in the edit to make the beginning shorter. Carrying this body, through the jungle, through the river, in the car, but then he brings it to this salon, this hairdressing place where Miguel works, and it's treated in a non-respectful way. Because they take it away from him, and suddenly he's not the owner anymore. That seemed to us very important, because, as gay people, we are not the owners of our partners, of our dead lovers, it's the family who owns them. We have not been legally married. So there is this suffering of, okay, until now, I was with this person, but then when the person is dead, it's like I'm nothing suddenly.
So that was interesting for us to do, that they take it away, and then he's in this world where he doesn't know these people, he doesn't know what they're going to do. We had worked before with a group of lawyers, who were trying to put in place a law to give rights to gay people to be able to decide [what happens with the body] also. That was also something that played a part in that.
The whole film was built around the burial, around the body, around this that you cannot see because Valentina has been killed, not just by terrorists, but by the hate crime that happened in Iquitos. In the past it was Shining Path, but in the present in this zone, religious movements are invading the Amazon. Evangelists, Mormons, they replace this moralistic approach regarding homosexuality, and they are all over. So that's why we also incorporated them in the film.
I find it interesting how your films keep returning to exploring notions of identity through absence. Tania had multiple names and an ‘incorrect’ name, and it’s similar with Valentina as well.
Identity is in flux and incorrectly labelled, and the person in question isn’t present. I find that curious.
I hadn’t thought about that, but what you say makes me think now.
We found it interesting, these two identities of her, because who is the other? Do we know? The other that is so close to us, how far do we know? The other question was, how far can you love someone else, even knowing that they’re different than you thought? I'm always touched by, for instance, people who say ‘oh, my father has dementia, and he does not recognise me anymore and he's so terrible’. But I think, ‘why?’. I mean, the person is still there. The love is still there. And this was a bit about that. Valentina wasn't what he expected and he's discovering that, but he's still attached to her and still wants reality to disappear. Love keeps things strong as they were, you know? So yeah, in those terms, we were thinking about identity and how it changes your perception and identity within love.
Could you tell me about the actor who plays Valentina? What is her personal relationship to that character? Is it just the name that you adopted for the character, or is there more to it?
Yes, that's her real name. When we were scouting for the film, we met her. She escaped to Iquitos. But it was not tragic, it was just she decided to move, and she went there. She sings in little bars, very Peruvian kind of things, not the Gardenia. Peruvian valses, and she's known for that.
She has charm and something with an obscure slant to it. It's not just beauty, she’s tough. And we liked that. We thought she could play Valentina because she has this double thing in her where she's a [feminine] singer, but she doesn't dress like a woman in real life. It's quite a lesbian kind of thing, you know? With some trousers.
The song came because of the killing, which happened in the bar called Gardenias, where they killed eight or nine gay people with machine guns, one after the other.
I would really like her to see the film, and we will take it to Iquitos because it's quite far.
I want to talk on your process again and ask what emerges for you first. There are very defined images in this film that stick in the mind. You've also got this poetic monologue, and you had that in your previous film as well. I'm curious, is it the images that emerge for you first or is it the words?
The words are there in the beginning, but not in their final way. They are there like, okay, he will remember this and that. It's hard to give information through a text without being banal. During the edit, once the film is quite far along, we rewrite everything. Saor came twice to Brussels to do the voiceover. We did one edit, she came, we did it. And then we didn't like it.
Benedict and I re-edited alone. People that would watch the first edit would think that Shining Path is a musical group, you know? We had to push a little bit to [put across] the roughness of the situation in Peru.
There are phrases in the film that I like very much, like “A terrorist? Valentina, I was crazy about you, it must be the breath in the deep of your throat” for instance. That wasn’t there to begin with. We added this to make sure they understand that she was a terrorist, because some people didn't understand. At the same time, it was a manifestation of love from him and acceptance that even if she is a terrorist, he still loves her.
Thinking on the images, I really love this shot of Saor lying on the bed with this hole in the hut wall in view. How did that image come about?
Well, in the very beginning, we wanted the house to be a character in the film. In the place we were scouting, there was a hut, one of these lodges. And nobody wanted to go in there because they said this hut is haunted, because terrorists used it to torture. And we thought, oh, this is so interesting.
The hut was abandoned, but in the middle of a place that was still running. Insects had taken it. We thought, let's create a character that is the hut, where in its walls the weight of the past can be felt.
We worked on the hut with Pilar Peredo, who is a very nice art director. We wanted a special wall that is cracked where we could project this dreamlike moment with the dog. And the hole was in the script. It wasn't in the hut, we made it.
We knew exactly this image. We had the beds, and then with our DP, we created the hole very carefully so that the camera can go through it, but not too big. So that was really some work, very specific for that image, the image of him lying with the dog.
And also, the painted numbers on the wall have to do with torture. It was there that they were taken, it was a refuge for terrorists. So the hut was important for us.
The idea was to make the wall disappear and be in the jungle. But it was too complicated to do that in reality because, first of all, the hut was not in the middle of the jungle, it was on the shore of the lake. So we decided to do this fade where it's like a hallucination, first where you see something, then you don't.
When the producer saw it, he said: What are you going to do? This is too long. Cut it! And you have to say, no, please let me try because it's going to work. Of course, the first time it looks like a silly fading, which doesn't work.
I'm glad that you managed to pull that sequence off. It's my favourite in the film. So very beautiful.
What do you hope that international audiences take from your film? Fuga explores domestic issues that aren't widely known about internationally. What do you want your audiences to go away feeling or inspired to do, or take action against, in their own communities?
We build an arc of a character, even if it's in disorder. We would like them to know how far you can go if you are persecuted. To survive and live an honest life, that can drive you to craziness, it can drive you to violence.
We showed the film in Brussels and a friend of ours said ‘I really now understand why a terrorist becomes a terrorist’. He also is gay. I think something of that can get through to an audience. We call it political subjectivity, that people can understand how it feels.
And for me, that's enough, that they can feel that how difficult it can be. We in Europe have a very cool life, because there is no censorship whatsoever. I left Peru because of that. To be able to live in the open air with someone, and not be hiding, afraid and looking over my shoulder. But there you can’t. You don't see that [on screen] very often.
Fugue screened at Edinburgh International Film Festival from August 16th to August 20th and at Lima International Film Festival on August 16th. With thanks to Mary Jiménez for her generosity with her time and for her insights, and to Julieta Esteban of See-Through Films for facilitating.
Blake Simons is a freelance film journalist and programmer with an interest in global queer cinemas. At KCL, they founded Queer Film Nights, a weekly film screening and discussion series dedicated to LGBTQ+ cinema. They feel films like this one to be vital and important and they enjoy hearing the stories behind films. You can follow their work at: https://www.instagram.com/bigbigbigturtle/
