Becoming Community. Filmmakers Crafting Futures in an Andean Town

In the aftermaths of the internal armed conflict in Peru (1980-2000), a group of film enthusiasts from the Andean highland town of Ayacucho began using cameras to tell their stories of violence in the region. According to scholarly analyses, these films reflect a collective trauma resulting from prolonged experiences of political violence and abandonment from the state. However, little attention has been given to the filmmakers’ creative practice and its impact on their community. To address this gap, this article takes a multimodal approach to ethnographically explore the circumstances and conditions in which these films are made. It argues that cinema-making in the Andes is a social intervention that resists contemporary memory regimes by forming a community of storytellers who reimagine the past to create alternative futures.