“The biggest concern is whether I am really a good translator of what my grandmother gave me,” says the plastic artist Rember Yahuarcani López in the documentary The song of the butterflies. The filmmaker Nuria Frigola Torrent directs this award-winning documentary that takes us on a journey from Lima to the Peruvian jungle and to La Chorrera, Colombia, a place where they remember “the greatest genocide of the indigenous peoples in the area,” as they point out upon arriving at La Casa Arana, currently converted into a school. “We navigate all our lives between the origin and the world to find ourselves. This film recounts the journey of its protagonists in this search. It is also an invitation to viewers to travel to their own roots: where does my family come from, who are my ancestors? This is a story of identity and memory”, comments the director in the presentation of the documentary available on the web.
With The Song of the Butterflies, we follow the journey of the Uitoto artist to Peba, where his family lives. Yahuarcani maintains that his work is inspired by the stories of his grandmother Martha, a survivor of the rubber massacre. “She thought she was going to be one of her voices, and I didn’t understand that until a few years ago. Martha is here when I pick up a brush, when I paint a character that she has told me about, that she has described to me. My work is her, what she has told me, the way she saw the Amazon. Her story,” he notes in the documentary.
The director tells us by email that “the investigation filming lasted 2 years between 2014 and 2015”, then she recorded in “2016 (Lima and Pebas), 2017 (Lima and Pebas), 2018 (Pebas and La Chorrera) and 2019 (Pebas). Each shoot lasted between 5 and 10 days. The biggest challenge was recording in La Chorrera, as it was very difficult to get there. Fortunately, we managed to work with a local producer from La Chorrera, Fanny Kuiru, who helped us with all the contacts. Fanny was also the translator from Uitoto to Spanish at the end of the film.” Upon arriving in La Chorrera, the production had to have a social permit. “From Manuel Zafiama, the chief of the Uitoto people, who after consulting him in La Maloca and seeing the filming progress, agreed to take the rest of the team.”
The winning documentary of the Guadalajara International Film Festival stands out for its beautiful photography, lighting and sound. “A challenge in the jungle is the sound: in Pebas from Friday night to Sunday all the speakers are turned on. From the bars to the churches, and it was impossible to record. We learned this along the way, and our recording slots were getting really short. In the following shoots we already had it clearer”.
As the director points out, beyond delving into the tragedy of the indigenous people, the story focuses on memory and the search for its origins. In fact, in one of the stories to the children of the area, The song of the butterflies –or of the spirits, as it is explained–, they are asked how they can draw a war. For all these reasons, the director explains that filming Yahuarcani was also a challenge. “Being able to record Rember painting in Lima was not easy. At the beginning he said ‘it looks as if we weren’t here’ and for him it was impossible”.❖
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