The Notebook Primer introduces vital figures, films, genres, and movements in film history.
The Secret Nation (Jorge Sanjinés, 1989).
In The Art and Politics of Bolivian Cinema (1999), still the only book on the subject written in English, José Sanchez-H. writes,“What is unique about Bolivian cinema reflects what is unique about the country’s situation. Hence, some of the most significant films deal with Bolivia’s Indigenous cultures and the ongoing struggle between reality and the ‘official story’ in the nation’s political life.” Bolivian history has been shaped by recurring cycles of domination and resistance: from the original Tiwanaku people, overtaken by the Inca, who were in turn colonized by the Spanish conquistadors, who were themselves overthrown by the early-nineteenth-century independence revolutionaries led by Simón Bolívar. From the nineteenth up until the mid-twentieth century, the country cycled through CIA-backed military dictatorships, leftist populist governments, attempts at democracy, and long periods of instability.
In the last twenty years, Bolivia’s Indigenous population has gained power in the government, most notably with the election of Evo Morales, the country’s first Indigenous president, in 2005. Under his leadership, Bolivia adopted a new constitution in 2009 and was officially refounded as a Plurinational State, recognizing 36 official Indigenous languages, alongside Spanish. This marked a major break from the past. In the nineteenth and twentieth centuries, despite Bolivia’s majority Indigenous population, the government often denied and sought to stamp out this deeply rooted heritage. The Bolivian state’s tentative but ongoing embrace of Indigenous identity and leftist politics today—which would have been unimaginable in the 1960s—is echoed in the evolution of the nation’s cinematic history, which moves from militant, class-conscious filmmaking toward more hybrid forms that center Indigenous epistemologies.
The subjugation of Indigenous populations was widespread across South America throughout the twentieth century. As revolutionary movements began to rise across the continent, they ignited a parallel explosion of radical film movements—most notably, Third Cinema. In their manifesto “Towards a Third Cinema,” the Argentine filmmakers Fernando Solanas and Octavio Getino criticized mainstream cinema as mere entertainment, or at best bourgeois critique, focused on effects, not causes. They rejected escapism in favor of politicized, guerrilla filmmaking. In Bolivia, the Grupo Ukamau, a leftist film collective founded in the late 1960s, emerged as a striking example of this ethos.
Ukamau (Jorge Sanjinés, 1966).
The Grupo Ukamau is widely regarded as the most important force in Bolivian cinema, responsible for several of the country’s most influential and widely seen films. Though there was a general lack of a filmmaking infrastructure in Bolivia, the group came into being during a fortuitous window of government investment in art and journalism. Following the 1952 National Revolution, which established universal suffrage and socioeconomic reforms, the Instituto Cinematográfico Boliviano (ICB) was founded to promote the country’s cinema; it would produce hundreds of documentaries and newsreels over its sixteen-year lifespan. Around this time, Ukamau founder Jorge Sanjinés returned to Bolivia after studying abroad, joining Oscar Soria, an award-winning short story writer based in La Paz. (Though it was formed as a collective, the group’s major films are all credited to Sanjinés, who quickly emerged as its principal director and creative force.) Through their day jobs at the ICB, Sanjinés, Soria, and producer Ricardo Rada were able to use equipment and resources to make a film. Intending to capture the cultural and economic tensions between Indigenous and mestizo groups in Bolivia, they developed the screenplay for Ukamau (1966).
Ukamau, which premiered at Cannes Critics’ Week, is a stark black-and-white film set on Isla del Sol in Lake Titicaca. With striking close-ups and a dynamic editing approach that mirrors the perspectives of its characters, the story opens with the brutal rape and murder of an Indigenous woman by a mestizo merchant. The film follows the woman’s husband as he quietly mourns and continues his daily life while plotting his revenge. In a gripping climax, the husband confronts the murderer in a desolate, fog-shrouded valley. After the release of the film, audiences began referring to the makers as the “Ukamaus,” and soon they adopted the name, a word that means “that’s how it is” in Aymara.
The Grupo Ukamau’s dedicated focus on Indigenous subjects was not without precedent. A generation earlier, filmmakers like Jorge Ruiz, Augusto Roca, José María Velasco Maidana, and Alberto Perrín began exploring questions of national identity and the fraught integration of Indigenous and European-descended populations, grappling with themes such as interracial romance and the decline of the Aymara empire (Maidana’s Wara Wara, 1930), as well as the urbanization of rural Indigenous populations and their shifting identities (Ruiz’s Vuelve Sebastiana, 1953). What set Ukamau apart was its sophisticated cinematic language (Sanjinés has cited Satyajit Ray, Francesco Rosi, and Theo Angelopoulos as influences) and its point of view—rather than observing Indigenous life through a folkloric or documentary lens, the film adopted a heightened realism and a willingness to engage directly with political and cultural conflict.
Blood of the Condor (Jorge Sanjinés, 1969).
On the same day that they won the Great Young Filmmakers Award at Cannes for Ukamau, Sanjinés and Soria were fired from the ICB, accused of inciting Indigenous groups and tarnishing Bolivia’s image. Their next film, Blood of the Condor (Yawar Mallku, 1969), based on a true story, dramatized a US Peace Corps sterilization campaign in a remote Quechua village. The villagers, upon discovering this conspiracy, retaliate violently, leading to deadly clashes. The film is furious, lyrical, and unflinching—though it stops short of becoming didactic. In lieu of a traditional distribution strategy, Sanjinés and his team traveled around the Altiplano and small villages of western Bolivia with a projector, speakers, and a generator, showing the film on a white sheet. Sanjinés estimates 250,000 Bolivians saw the film, and protests in the capital inspired by the film’s critical portrayal of US intervention led to the expulsion of the Peace Corps from Bolivia in 1971.
Sanjinés wrestled with his filmmaking process and philosophy through his writings. In his 1976 manifesto, “Problems of Form and Content in Revolutionary Cinema,” he retroactively critiques some of the visual choices in Blood of the Condor as too flashy. Acknowledging critiques from Indigenous audiences who argued that the film did not truly express their specific cultural modes of storytelling, he writes, “When we shot Blood of the Condor … though we desired to contribute politically with our work by denouncing the gringos and showing a social picture of Bolivian reality … we were employing a formal treatment that led us to select scenes according to our personal tastes, without taking into account their communicability or their cultural meaning.” Elsewhere in his manifesto, Sanjinés grapples with the vertical hierarchy of production and the danger of pursuing beauty in political filmmaking.
Sanjinés was optimistic that his audiences would help shape his future films: “Thanks to the confrontation of our films with the people, thanks to their criticisms, suggestions, advice, protests and confusions due to our misunderstanding of the ideological relationship between form and content, we were slowly distilling a language and incorporating the creativity of the people themselves, whose notable expressive and interpretative abilities demonstrate a sensibility that is pure, free of stereotypes and alienations.” Incorporating the feedback they received on Blood of the Condor, the Ukamau Group’s next film, The Courage of the People (El coraje del pueblo, 1971), took on an even more explicitly political aesthetic. The film uses longer takes and incorporates people who experienced historical events in the plot—the San Juan massacre of miners in 1967 by the military—as players in the film. The film depicts a central group of people rather than a single protagonist, favoring the collective over the individual. Courage of the People was banned by yet another new Bolivian government, the military dictatorship of Hugo Banzer Suarez, and Sanjinés was sent into exile while Antonio Eguino, his cinematographer, was jailed for trying to bring a copy of the film into the country. The Courage of the People wasn’t shown in Bolivia until 1979, when the public forced democratic elections.
The Secret Nation (Jorge Sanjinés, 1989).
In 1980, a coup by General Luis García Meza thrust the country and the filmmaking community into chaos. Luís Espinal Camps, a priest, film critic, filmmaker, and member of the Grupo Ukamau, was murdered by a paramilitary death squad. The other members, who had just started to return from their exiles, fled once again. With so many cycles of exile and return, Sanjinés’s philosophies changed, and the style of the group shifted from stark, purely political docufiction to a more ambitious investigation into the “Indigenous identity.” This shift led to one of their most beloved films, The Secret Nation, (La nación clandestina, 1989).
In the central image of The Secret Nation, a tall Indigenous man (Reynaldo Yujra) carries a large green devil mask on his back on an odyssey from La Paz through the Altiplano of Bolivia. He traverses stark Andean mountains, cliffs, and isolated villages on the way to his hometown. Once there, he plans to perform a ritualistic dance of self-sacrifice called the Tata Danzante, intended to ensure the well-being of his fellow villagers, which will end in his death. The film follows two timelines: Sebastian’s present-day return to his village and his tortured memories of the past. Years earlier, he participated in a scam to keep the villagers unaware of the mobilization efforts of other communities against the government.
This film sees Sanjinés taking a radical approach to cinematic time, one that he identifies as inherently “Indigenous” as opposed to the hegemonic “Western” concept of time. He details this philosophy in his 1979 book, Teoría y práctica junto al pueblo (Theory and Practice with the People), arguing that Western time “begins with a genesis and is projected toward the infinite until meeting with the final judgement. It is a worldview in which what has passed can never return, and for that reason [the West] is a culture that disdains the past, casting it as outdated, obsolete, only fit for adorning museums.” In contrast, by toggling between two timelines—Sebastian’s present-day decision to return to his village and sacrifice himself via dance ritual, and his tortured memories of his bad behavior in his community—The Secret Nation endeavors to present a notion of time in which “the past constantly returns, people coexist with the past, and the future can be behind us rather than ahead. … In order to move forward, we need to look backward; we must contemplate and reflect upon the past. By incorporating it into the present, we are turning it into the future.”
This notion received a lot of attention from filmmakers and academics in Bolivia and beyond. This film and others came under fire in the 2019 book Ukamau Abigarrado, which reflects changing attitudes toward the group in contemporary Bolivia. The anthology, published in Spain with contributions from academics across Latin America, unpacks and critically examines the legacy and narrativization of the Grupo Ukamau. An essay by Bolivian filmmaker and professor Miguel Hilari dismantles the notion that Indigenous time and Occidental time operate differently and critiques some of Sanjinés’s fundamental understandings of the Indigenous experience. He argues that, rather than make the film and story more accessible to Indigenous people, Sanjinés made these Indigenous stories more accessible to the intellectuals.
Above: The Courage of the People (Jorge Sanjinés, 1971). Below: Still Burn (Mauricio Alfredo Ovando, 2018).
Throughout the splintering and reforming membership rolls of Grupo Ukamau, Jorge Sanjinés always remained at its center. While his name is synonymous with Grupo Ukamau, its strength lay in its collectivism. Collaborators like Eguino, Yujra, and Beatriz Palacios (Sanjinés’s wife and producer) shaped its aesthetic and ideological foundation.
Sanjinés’s centrality has led to a complicated legacy. The early films of the Grupo Ukamau, so deeply rooted in Bolivia’s social and political realities, remain immensely influential in contemporary cinematic practice, but in my conversations with some contemporary Bolivian filmmakers, I’ve heard a sense of frustration toward Sanjinés himself as the elder statesman of their national cinema. As his political cause—the centering of Indigenous experiences and voices—moved closer to the mainstream through the rise of Movimento al Socialismo (MAS) and Evo Morales, Sanjinés became less a revolutionary fighting against corrupt institutions and more of an institution unto himself. His close ties to the government and the pedantic rhetoric of his recent films—along with the fact that at 88, Sanjinés continues to receive significant financial support from the state, which might otherwise be distributed to emerging filmmakers—leaves many young filmmakers feeling disillusioned.
Much of today’s Bolivian cinema is less explicitly political and more introspective. Many filmmakers grapple with the stories on which they were raised, searching for authenticity in their own narratives. Mauricio Alfredo Ovando’s Still Burn (Algo quema, 2018), for example, cuts between intimate family memories with controversial historical events surrounding his grandfather Alfredo Ovando Candia’s presidency. In particular, he grapples with the fact that his grandfather’s political and military alliances tie him to the 1967 San Juan massacre of the miners depicted in Sanjinés’s Courage of the People. In Nana (2016), Luciana Decker uses home videos to explore her complex relationship with Hilaria, the Indigenous live-in maid who was part of her household growing up. Miguel Hilari’s films likewise contrast personal and collective histories. In The Corral and the Wind (Corral y el viento, 2014), he uses voiceover to narrate his return to his father’s Andean village, using a reflective, observational style to examine the intersections of memory, cultural continuity, and a collective identity.
The Great Movement (Kiro Russo, 2021).
Bolivian cinema has begun to make its mark internationally. Filmmakers like Kiro Russo have gained recognition at the Venice and New York Film Festivals. Russo’s works—most notably The Great Movement (El gran movimiento, 2021) and Dark Skull (Viejo calavera, 2016)—blend surrealism and raw realism, portraying miners battling the forces of illness, addiction, and an unfamiliar urban landscape. Alejandro Loayza Grisi’s Utama (2022) won Best International Feature at Sundance. The film follows an Indigenous couple living in a village, where food and water resources are becoming scarce due to climate change. The couple must decide whether they want to leave the village and go to the city. Mela Marquez, the longstanding director of the Cinemateca and the director of Sayariy (1995) and Saber que te he buscado (2015), bemoans the fact that Utama wasn’t widely seen in Bolivia, though it spoke to present-day issues.
There are also ongoing efforts to locate and restore lost Bolivian films. Daniela Anze Zuazo, an archivist at the Cinemateca, tells me that there are huge numbers of films yet to be discovered that will fundamentally redefine how we understand Bolivian cinema history. There are rolls of nitrate in the basement of the Cinemateca, and there is not enough funding to restore and distribute them. The excavation of Bolivian films lost to history—such as those of the Taller de Cine Minero, a three-month training program in 1983 in which miners in the Telamayu mine in Atocha made short 35mm films—can help rewrite our understanding of Indigenous filmmaking in Bolivia.
Grupo Ukamau’s legacy persists not just in its films, but in the questions they raise: Whose history is being told? Whose gaze shapes the narrative? Today’s Bolivian filmmakers, whether turning the camera on themselves or reconstructing the past, continue this interrogation. The rich debate around the Grupo Ukamau—its place in Third Cinema, the way that it was organized and led—can illuminate how we understand other film movements and collectives. It’s important to interrogate the dominant narratives, especially those established by scholars from the outside looking in. These alternative frameworks can tell us about power in film production, among political movements, and among artists. The Grupo Ukamau was an important step forward, but it’s only halfway toward a truly collective camera.