For several, many years, Juana Burga was a myth. “Yes, it could be, it's good that you say it like that, it's a good description,” she tells me, while she settles in for the talk. We are in a boutique hotel in Miraflores—with just a few rooms—and Burga had a press conference in the morning and has one of the most intense agendas in recent months promoting The Most Feared Skin, the film by Joel Calero that premieres this Thursday the 25th. in theaters.
“I vanished and was not heard from, not because I didn't do things, but because I didn't bounce around in Peru,” he explains. “And I think that is a bit of the theme that we see everywhere, that the girl with dark skin, black hair, and brown eyes does not cause surprise. Or there is no representation that makes us feel proud to the level of saying 'Wow, I'm so proud of my brown skin, my high cheekbones, my brown eyes, my black hair!' And I think that is one of the things that I have understood, because my achievements have been and for so many years—I have been in the international fashion industry for more than 15 years—that is why, it is because of how I see myself.”
Calero says that he saw Burga in The Last Ones, a 2017 Argentine apocalyptic film and decided that he wanted her, no matter what, for the second film in his film trilogy of memory, which began with The Last Afternoon in 2016 and will culminate. in Family Album in 2025. The first tape talked about a former MRTA militant. The third will revolve around a military man. And in The Most Feared Skin, Burga is Alejandra, a young woman who returns to Cusco for family reasons to find out that her father is alive and that he was a member of the Shining Path.
YOU CAN SEE: Directors of 'Tigres', a documentary that will soon be released on Disney, give details of the film
Other models choose roles of the lover, the trophy wife, the sexy girl that men lose their minds over in silly comedies, but Burga's new role is a drama that explores the family impact left by a terrorist years after concluded the internal armed conflict. It's a conscious choice for roles like 'Justin Timberlake's girlfriend' that she was once offered. “I said, well, if they are going to sexualize me or put me in that way to start a new career with that image, it didn't inspire me or it wasn't something I wanted. “I wanted to tell stories of empowered women, of women who are strong, who have a story to tell,” she highlights.
It was in her “myth” times that she was known as Juanita Burga, while she walked the most renowned catwalks; For the average Peruvian, her name was, if not something unknown, something gaseous reserved for fashion magazines and the jet set. “I didn't mind the 'Juanita', but I did my international career as Juana, as she is in my documents, as she is in my passport. I think the diminutive was because I started so young, I went with my mother to my auditions in a school uniform, so young.” She also received bullying because of her thinness and the nickname Juanita, which is reminiscent of the famous mummy of Arequipa. “They bothered me a lot (with it), but now it's so cultural that I would even love to make a movie about it, you know?”
About The Most Feared Skin, Burga says that “he is showing the character as a human being.” “The character develops into the best version of him or the worst version of him. So, what Joel (Calero) is doing is showing all those layers of a person, of Alejandra being a daughter abandoned by her father that she never had. A grandmother who doesn't know that this granddaughter exists or who has never spoken to her, and with a father who doesn't either, and who has a story behind her that not even her daughter knows. So, I think that's the message, you know? And for me really the criticism, as you mentioned, I think is what we are waiting for right now; It’s really seeing people, seeing how they connect.”
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