La Huella

“I believe La huella (The footprint) can be somewhat political, but it operates in a different way. The film travels through things, moving the insides of minor details, gestures or sounds. It moves from the smallest bits in order to generate something. 

The way it was shot, with fairly slow camera movements, is not meant to highlight the pain; that was never my intention, but perhaps it is the exact length of time it takes to develop empathy towards the drama that unfolds; the time needed for the spectator to incorporate the drama of the victims and produce an impression that is part of a change or a track. 

In making the film, I repeatedly referred to the Image Bank recompiled by the Commission of Truth and Reconciliation. The Bank features roughly 1700 photographs from widely varied sources such as the press, church and military archives, family albums, or albums by independent photographers.

The Commission of Truth and Reconciliation was a joint effort of the Peruvian government, alongside various civil society organizations and members, to grasp the conflict we were experiencing, an extremely painful conflict. Its creation became possible only after Alberto Fujimori stepped down, a transitional government was set up, and people started trying to make sense of the domestic war that haunted Peru for the past 20 years. The war claimed more than 69 000 lives, mostly of Quechua peasants who were murdered or forcibly disappeared.

For La huella, I also heard statements from victims’ families at the Public Hearings in Ayacucho. The statements were very painful and I felt I couldn’t use them directly as raw material. Considering the testimonies, I feel I couldn’t have filmed anything, so I decided to keep only the photographs: although they were also graphic, the images afforded me some margin of movement, or at least of appropriation.  

There is a very important ethical stance when it comes to approaching and filming these photographs. I didn’t want to do it from a perspective of historical analysis, nor in an informative way; I wanted to be closer to the vibration these photos elicit in me, a vibration I think is connected to the traumatic, to recognizing what is human in them, the drama of the victims. 

For the voiceover, I invited José Pablo Baraybar, a forensic anthropologist who was considerably involved with the exhumation and returning of remains to the victims’ families. He seemed to provide a good counterpoint to the photos, since his voice was also a statement — not from the victims’ perspective, but as another very close and crucial eyewitness for the families.

José Pablo had the views of someone who had seen everything, or almost everything, since he had been deplyoyed on similar missions to several locations, like Sarajevo, Rwanda, Haiti, and Somalia. I think his statement helped reveal, in the photographs, the sensation of seeing them for the first time, of being very deeply marked by them.

And since José Pablo’s voice was speaking in first person, I decided I would do the same. People tend to think my voice is also a statement, but that is not the case. I did not directly experience the loss of family and friends during those years. Nevertheless, it seemed to me that first-person was the way to go; first-person is the tense of the present and of the self as utterer; it’s the tense of one who experiences. And the text narrated by me was written to convey the impressions I had in looking at the photographs.” 

Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski in a statement to PLATFORM:VB (July 2015)