Peru’s Internal Armed Conflict (IAC) raged from 1980 to 2000, with the violence mostly occurring in the Andean highlands. In the past two decades, Peruvian filmmakers have turned their attention to offering cinematic portrayals of the impact of this trauma on their society, specifically on Indigenous communities. How does cinema’s unique ability to preserve and articulate memory serve to further the conversation about the IAC in a post-conflict society? In this article, we analyse two recent Peruvian films – Magallanes (Salvador ) and NN (Héctor Gálvez 2014) – to determine the impact of representing this violence and trauma on screen. We find that these films portray specific typologies of violence during the IAC that were largely perpetrated by the state. In doing so, the films bring this aspect of the IAC back into a fading national stream of consciousness. As a result, these films become a political act in a society that is forgetting its recent past.
Schuelke et al. (Sat,) studied this question.