By Sandro Mairata
Something to know about Panatonic Frame (35), is that “Panatonic” is not his real last name. “I learned that writers, painters and other artists can choose their names,” he answers from Buenos Aires, where he has returned after a marathon session at the Mar del Plata Film Festivalwhere her first feature film, Kinra – a film spoken in Quechua – has just won the award for best feature film, a historic achievement on the same level as Claudia Llosa’s The Frightened Tit in Berlin.
This is because Mar del Plata is a class A festival similar to Berlin, Cannes or San Sebastián, according to the current classification. Kinra is about a young man who migrates to the city of Cusco from the countryside, but then decides to return to his mother’s side.
The award in Mar del Plata elevates cinema outside of Lima in times when the state support it receives is questioned. And like every story of Peruvian cinema, Kinra’s is one of shortcomings: Panatonic was barely able to complete a version in the format required for viewing (DCP) – it does not have a copy on the Web to show to the media – and Mar del Plata accepted his application after three previous rejections at other festivals.
-This has been quite a surprise.
-Yes, it has been a very generous selection. Having been selected, I thought, I was already happy. It is not that Peruvian films are considered very competitive in the cinematographic world. That nothing happened was real. I had sent it to “work in progress” competitions and they had rejected us. We sent it thinking “see what comes out.”
-When was it filmed?
-In June 2022, in Cusco city and Chumbivilcas.
Scene. Of the protagonists of the film that was filmed in Chumbivilcas, Cusco. Photo: diffusion
-Was filming it in Quechua a natural decision or is there a personal discourse behind it?
-It happened to Oscar Catacora when he filmed Wiñaypacha. He didn’t know whether to film it in Aymara. That happens to those of us who speak Quechua: it is not a “sellable” language. I think that doubt was always there, but ever since I went to the film club at the age of 17 to watch films in Chinese, Iranian and other languages, I asked myself “why are there no films in Quechua?” I built that throughout the process. In 2013-2017 the DAFO has provided exclusive funds for indigenous languages; The film had a title in Spanish before: “Tierra natal”.
-Does Kinra mean “homeland”?
-Yes and no. “Kinra” is the name of the character’s house (Atoqcha), from the place where I was born, the geographical place. A friend who speaks Chinese gave it a title in Chinese and the translation would be “land of the ancestors.”
-Do you consider that native language cinema is discriminated against in Peru?
-I wrote the film in 2014, later a second version was made. We won the native languages fund and in 2021 we call the actors. I saw a video in Mar del Plata in which you are critical of the current situation of cinema. I have written on the website of the Congress saying that saying “positive discrimination” makes no sense. The Aymara, Andean, and Amazonian people experience structural racism. It attacks our participation in different aspects of life. We live in a racist and classist country and all these ideas and structures are our daily lives, unfortunately.
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