Claudia Llosa

Peruvian director Claudia Llosa hit the big-time last year when her film ‘The Milk of Sorrow’ snagged the Golden Bear at the Berlin Film Festival. It’s a deeply personal and lyrical film that offers a stark and haunting investigation into the lasting pain felt in Peru after the brutality of the Shining Path guerrillas that tore the country apart during the eighties. She spoke to LWLies about her inspirations, the role of magic realism and the effect her film has had on Peruvian cinema.

 

The film was in part based on your findings in an anthropological textbook written on the subject. How did you go about turning such material into a script?
The book represents many testimonies from a lot of women that experienced the civil war period. Actually, they are more like monologues. I was reading them to connect somehow with the pain these women experienced and one of them actually spoke about ‘the milk of sorrow’, and I was captured by this idea and this was somehow a turning point in the development of the script.

How difficult is it to get a film produced in Peru?
In Peru we have one fund and until recently it provided for only around two films a year and only amounted to $70,000 per film, so only really a little amount of money. But now, because of our film and all that has happened – after the Golden Bear in Berlin - those numbers have tripled. Our budget was raised mostly from Spanish investment – about 80% of the budget. It has been a beautiful example of co-production – 80% of the money was Spanish, but the story is wholly Peruvian.

How has the film been received in Peru?
When the film was released we already had the Berlin award, so for Peruvian cinema it was something unbelievable. Just to be accepted into the official selection was something that had never happened for a Peruvian film, so we had already gone a lot further than our expectations. Everyone in Peru knows about the film, even if they haven’t seen it. It’s been a huge thing for us, and not because of the film itself, but what it represents. A film that contains so much pain and sorrow has somehow given us so much joy and given us the opportunity to relate the idea that [such success] is possible. It’s important for Peruvian film to receive this kind of proof. Even people who didn’t like the film agree that it’s been very important for Peruvian cinema.

Some reviewers have placed the film in the tradition of Latin American ‘magic realism’. Would you agree with that?
Here, the line between real and fantastical is blurry. The viewer has to dig into the film and make an open interpretation of things. The kind of atmosphere - or the universe - created by the film uses illusionary elements to speak about a problem that is real, based on true stories, but it creates this possibility of talking about reality through the eyes of the viewer. The film becomes a prism that you can relate to in different ways, depending on your point of view. If you are from this culture you will relate to the film in a very different way than if you are from abroad. You are not supposed to understand all of it, but you can follow the emotional flow of the film and somehow grab your own story and go with it and somehow get a glimpse of a little picture of one story. A film can never represent reality. Which reality? The one that you see? The one that I see? There are so many angles. This kind of allegorical storytelling helped me to deal with problems that are so difficult and so complex. Magic realism has to also with the idea of exaggeration of reality and everything that goes on in the film could actually happen, so it’s not quite magic realism, but I do understand the connection that people make with it.

Magaly Solier, who plays Fausta, was born in the town of Huanta, which experienced especially harsh treatment from the Shining Path guerrillas. How did that inform her approach to the role?
Magaly and I have known each other for years. We started working together on my first film, ‘Madeinusa’ [http://www.imdb.com/title/tt0476298/], at which time she had no experience at all with film, but she is so natural and organic and can - without any kind of struggle - connect with a character and speak through her skin. She had so many mixed feelings about the role. She was afraid to look into Fausta, but I wanted her to relate to her character in a positive way. She eventually started to connect with her and understand her, and when she actually grew to love Fausta, she felt able to go deeper into her own memories. Magaly was quite young when the troubles started, but there were so many things that her mother and grandmother had told her, so she put a lot into the film.

Music and singing are central to the film. Why are they so important?
I wrote the lyrics for the songs in the film, and Magaly put the melodies. This is how we started to find the voice of Fausta. It was the moment that she connected with Fausta on a deep level and found her in herself. Singing and dancing and music and the creative expression that comes form the Andes are so important for that culture. It’s the only way that they can talk about what they don’t understand or how they feel. It’s a cathartic process, so it was very important for me to use singing as the only way that Fausta can connect. It’s the unconscious flow of the culture finding a way out, but the film tries to make that process conscious. It’s not enough to just sing for yourself in a whisper or as a mantra to repeat and repeat, because you won’t ever stop or ever learn from it. When you start finding a way to say it out loud and connect and to tell your story something will turn up. It’s like a process of awakening the consciousness…