Peruvian filmmaker and music producer Geraldine Zuasnabar Ravelo has released "Flor Pucarina, rebelde hasta los huesos" ("Flor Pucarina, Rebel to the Bone"), a documentary about Andean folk singer Flor Pucarina, among the national film releases this month.
Zuasnabar said the film opens in 1960s Lima, where hundreds of migrants packed the city's coliseums to watch Pucarina perform, many of them covering their faces as they did so. She said this was, in her view, the deepest wound carried by migrants: in such a discriminatory society, hiding where you came from was sometimes a form of self-protection, and it was important to bring that out through the documentary's images and music.
Who was Flor Pucarina
Born Leonor Chavez Rojas, Flor Pucarina became the first Andean artist to hold a concert at Lima's Teatro Municipal. Zuasnabar said it was impossible to condense the singer's life and legacy into a single film and described the documentary as a first approach, adding that she hoped further projects, whether a fiction film or a series, would follow.
When Chavez Rojas died in 1987, more than 40,000 people attended her funeral, Zuasnabar said. She added that the singer had also had to be defended against prejudice and labels attached to her over the years, and that people of her own generation saw Pucarina as an inspirational figure whose legacy had helped them rethink and "territorialize" their feminism.
Confronting a sexist narrative
Asked whether the documentary grew out of recognising a sexist view of the singer, Zuasnabar said society had historically framed women in one of two ways, either as saints or with a crude insult, with no middle ground. She said Pucarina had been cast by the public as a kind of Santa Rosa de Lima figure people felt compelled to defend, while a more macho, misogynistic strain attacked her, and that she felt this grey area was being overlooked. She said the conservatism and fundamentalism she still sees running strong in Peruvian society convinced her to make a film that placed the singer in a position of humanity and dignity, though she admitted finding a middle ground on the subject remains complex.
Zuasnabar said she was not certain she would make another film specifically about Pucarina, but that there was much more to explore about Andean women who broke with the stereotype of the submissive woman often imposed on women from the Andes, including a gender analysis grounded in a territorial perspective.
An uncredited songwriter
The documentary suggests, subtly, that Pucarina may have co-written some of her own songs without receiving credit for it, something Zuasnabar said was one of the main reasons she was driven to make the film, though she said the subject deserved a separate project of its own. Zuasnabar, whose mother sings in the duo Las Salcabambinitas, said she grew up hearing that families considered it the worst possible outcome when a daughter said she wanted to become a singer, and that she carried that stigma toward women as she grew up. She said what she found most striking about Pucarina's story was that the singer disregarded all of that.
Asked whether Pucarina would attend today's protest marches, Zuasnabar said she believed she would, at least some of the time, but that Pucarina would also have criticised the marches on other occasions, since she was a very complex woman. Zuasnabar said this was why she resisted turning the singer into a saint or a romanticised figure, and preferred that audiences connect with her instead through her music.
The 'historic debt' to Andean artists
Zuasnabar said Pucarina's career reflects what she called a historic debt owed to working women in the arts. She said the work of Andean artists remains extremely hard, with musicians working more than 12 hours a day without social security, and that the treatment of artists also varies by social class, comparing a musician in a Huancayo orchestra with a musician in the cumbia band Grupo 5.
Filming wrapped during the pandemic, and Zuasnabar said most of the testimonies gathered came from elderly people who had rarely given interviews before, some of whom declined to take part. For those who agreed, the crew worked around whatever locations were available, which she said may have cost some context. She cited Anibal Rios, one of the most important embroiderers still living, who was filmed but lives in a small room in the Lima district of El Agustino that the crew could not film inside. She said the scale of his artistry is beautiful but reflects the precarious conditions facing popular artists.
A wider cultural battle
Asked about the condition of artists after winning support from DAFO, Zuasnabar said she saw a broader cultural battle underway, describing a far-right narrative strategy at work not only in Peru but across Latin America, pointing to figures such as Cerimedo and the use of bots to shape narratives online. She said fujimorismo's response to protests against President Dina Boluarte's government had significantly weakened social movements in Peru, and that fear of going out into the streets, including among artists who had previously spoken out, made it difficult to rebuild the country's social fabric, something she said was badly needed.
Asked whether a screen quota for Peruvian cinema should have been part of the debate, Zuasnabar said it was urgent and necessary, since filmmakers already struggle to make films and then need audiences to actually see them. She said other countries support their industries through screen quotas and that Peru needed policies covering the distribution and circulation of films, not only in cinemas but in other settings too. She acknowledged criticism within the film circuit of commercial cinema chains as exploitative businesses, but said filmmakers still operate within a capitalist system and should not give up on cinemas because of it.
