Collective Messages: Short Films of Grupo Chaski

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Collective Messages: Short Films of Grupo Chaski

New restorations in Peruvian cinema

(Grupo Chaski, 1982-1985, ~70 min, DCP)

RSVP 

Grupo Chaski, a Peruvian filmmaking collective named after the Quechua word for “messenger” (a nod to ancient Incan culture), formed in the early 1980s with a belief in the power of cinema to carry messages of social transformation and liberation. Emerging in a period of acute political and social turbulence, Grupo Chaski responded to ongoing struggles with issues of class, race, and gender in Peru by tackling legacies of Spanish colonialism and the contemporary influx of urban migration. Best known for two searing feature films, GREGORIO (1984) and JULIANA (1989), the group produced an important body of documentary and narrative shorts in the 1980s and 90s that have gone largely underseen in the US. Alongside film production, Grupo Chaski developed self-organized structures for film education, distribution, and the exhibition of moving images, manifesting in a network of over 30 microcinemas that stretch across Peru. Practicing a committed cinema in the vein of the New Latin American Cinema movement, Grupo Chaski’s important work addresses systemic oppression while forging new visions of solidarity and resistance that persist today.

Films include:

Caminos de Liberación / Pathways of Liberation

(Grupo Chaski, Peru, 1985, 20 min, 16mm-to-digital)

In this piece, the Chaski Group studies the theories and practices of liberation theology - a strand of Catholicism that emerged in Latin America in the 1960s. The short film shows priests, believers, and lay citizens as well, all uniting into a social movement born from the idea of a popular and progressive identity. An impressive portrait of a country in flames, today more relevant and necessary than ever. (Documenta Madrid)

Restored by GUARANGO CINE Y VIDEO with the support of the MINISTRY OF CULTURE in 2022.

Miss Universo en el Perú / Miss Universe in Peru

(Grupo Chaski, Peru, 1982, 45 min, Digital)

The backbone of Miss Universe in Peru is found in a juxtaposition of two events that took place simultaneously in Lima in July 1982: the Miss Universe beauty pageant and the sixth national congress of the Confederación Campesina del Perú, an agricultural labor association. With an eye for irony, Grupo Chaski conducts interviews and refilms television broadcasts to craft a pointed indictment of how gender intersects with race, class, and ongoing forms of coloniality. (Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg)


About Grupo Chaski:

Made up of Stefan Kaspar, Alejandro Legaspi, Fernando Espinoza, María Barea and Fernando Barreto, the Chaski Group was born in 1982, a time of great optimism in Peru upon the arrival of democracy after twelve years of military dictatorship. The collective's main goal was to spread cinema beyond Lima and to record the situations of the provinces and the city outskirts, which had always gone unseen. This gave rise to such unquestionable masterpieces in Latin American cinema as GREGORIO (1984) and JULIANA (1988), and fascinating original works like MISS UNIVERSE EN EL PERÚ (1982) and CAMINOS DE LIBERACIÓN (1985), the recent restorations of which we are showing for the first time in Spain. (Documenta Madrid)

Image credit: Grupo Chaski production crew

Contact The Block Museum of Art for more information: (847) 491-4000 or email us at block-museum@northwestern.edu