By Sandro Mairata
“This is a miracle, it is beautiful, it is an incredible feeling, I mean, wow… long live Peru and long live cinema,” an excited Klaudia Reynicke told me on Saturday, February 24 from Germany, shortly after having won the Grand Prize. of the Jury in the Generation section of the 2024 Berlin Film Festival, the event popularly known as Berlinale. She said it shortly after having lost for a moment, among the festival crowd, Abril Gjurinovic, the young co-star of her film Reinas, along with Luana Vega, a film that the Peruvian public has not yet seen but that we already celebrate.
Before, on the opening night, Reynicke had taken and then posted a photo on her networks with maestro Wim Wenders behind her, and with the entire cast of Queens on the red carpet. After the premiere and the applause – including ovation – the Berlinale was over for her. Jimena Lindo, co-star, was on the beach in Lima. Gonzalo Medina had also returned to Peru.
“I returned to Switzerland, to my real life, on Wednesday,” he explains. “I was already thinking about other things, I was thinking about my boys' school. My mind wasn't on it anymore. At Sundance we were successful, but we didn't win awards, it's normal not to win awards. When I received this email on Thursday night and they told me about a prize, I couldn't believe it. They told me that I should return to Berlin immediately. I live in a place far from the big city, I had to look for an airport. And on top of that, they told me that I couldn't tell anyone about the award.” Lindo and Medina were suspicious when Reynicke returned to Berlin, but the director could not confirm anything to them until just a few hours before receiving the award.
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There, at the Berlinale headquarters, had remained our other award-winning director, Franco García Becerra from Cusco, whose film Raíz (presented as Through Rocks and Clouds) won the Jury Prize in the same Generation section. “From the beginning, the plan had been to stay the entire week of the festival,” he says in Lima, with his diploma framed and stored in a red festival bag, while we chat at a Starbucks. During the Berlinale days, neither Reynicke nor García could meet, and it was only at the awards ceremony that both teams saw each other. The awards for both are the most important in recent Peruvian cinema, adding to the award for best film won last November by another Cusco native, Marco Panatonic, for Kinra, at the Mar del Plata Film Festival.
The meeting motivated photos to remember, but there was one that made many rounds on the networks: that of the children Alberth Merma (protagonist of Raíz) with Abril Gjurinovic, smiling side by side. He, a chullo Andean boy with a copper complexion, along with a girl with ash blonde hair and a white complexion, from the capital. “Incredible, what a wonderful photo,” says Reynicke. “That photo of the two of them there is very strong. It's like a miracle, this is very good. And even happier to have another Peruvian film awarded, when Raíz won the award I think I came out screaming louder than everyone.”
Reynicke (Lima, 1976) was inspired by Peruvian films such as the documentary Metal y melancolía (1993) by the Peruvian-Dutch director Heddy Honnigman to present the story of a Lima mother (Lindo) who must leave the country with her two daughters (Vega and Gjurinovic) after the Fujimori self-coup of 1992, but first he will make them spend time with their absent father, played by Molina. Filmed with elegance and – to quote Honnigman – melancholy, the story is a delicate study of family relationships that draw on Reynicke's nostalgia for the Peru she left behind.
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Way to the rooms
“Imagine what these awards mean for Peru, for cinema, for culture, it is the best thing that can happen to us,” says Reynicke. “And they are such different films. I mean, I haven't seen Raíz, but from what I read, what I hear, it is the diversity of Peru. “It couldn't have been better than what happened.”
Reynicke and García Becerra (Cusco, 1977) have been united by providence in a new granite, incontestable response to the Peruvian political sectors that seek to take resources away from Peruvian cinema with projects such as the Tudela Law. Both films were made with state incentives that were not sufficient either: Reinas is a Spanish-Peruvian-Swiss co-production, and Raíz received various funds and ended up being a Chilean-Peruvian co-production.
García Becerra has a lot to tell about the odyssey to make just one film. Trained as an anthropologist in Cusco, he became interested in visual anthropology “I dedicated a lot to photography” and this led him to “leave everything” and begin to accumulate courses, workshops, a year of film studies in Lima and build a career. as a director of music and institutional videos and to occupy various technical roles in Peruvian films. Raíz's project was winning screenwriting awards and then in its various stages it grew in competitions in Chile, where a common contact was encouraged to join as a partner in the project to move it forward.
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“What we wanted to tell had a technical requirement,” explains the director. “And for that you need to invest in the best equipment possible. I brought several of them from my previous film, Vientos del sur (2018).” Although he is reluctant to talk about “references,” he admits that he likes the caustic style of contemporary directors like Chloé Zhao in Nomadland and some of that permeated the film “although I wasn't thinking about it, it was something more unconscious.”
Both films will go through a festival route before reaching Peruvian theaters, which also await Kinra. On Raíz, García Becerra laughs every time he is forced to use the word “organic,” that term distorted by things on the internet. The word comes up again and again with what it means: “We won some funds from Cinema of Tomorrow as a project at the Lima Film Festival, we have been there. The organic thing would be to debut there, hopefully. And then would come the commercial premiere. That's another plan.”
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