Huacho by Alejandro Fernández

Huacho is a corporal experience, a sensorial delight, pure cinema energy that shakes the spine and instantly connected me to my own ground, with the dusty earth that gave me life and the grave which will embrace my bones. I felt it through my senses, just like the mighty sun that holds my awakenings, and in the beautiful language I speak: Español. But above all this film is the place where I belong: Latinoamérica. It tells the simplest story and the oldest one: to wake up, to earn a living, to rest a moment and finally return home and wait for the next day. The main character is a family: two grandparents, a single mother and a son. They are farmers, working-class people living in this century but at the same time in the past.

Although there are plenty of themes around Huacho, I will choose two: the first being its Neorealist heritage, the urgency to continue thinking about cinema as an ethical attitude to life, a compromise with your own time, with your own community. A political way of perceiving filmmaking, that links this film with the ones of visionaries such as Roberto Rossellini, Ken Loach, Abbas Kiarostami, Robert Guediguian and Abdellatif Kechiche. Artists who are capable of explaining to us that the world can be united with similar concerns, avoiding exclusion or rejection.

The second, and perhaps more meaningful to me (because of its relevance to the way cinema displays images of present-day life) is the subject of labour. “By the sweat of your brow you will eat your food… ”, seems to echo from the distance of ancient times on every frame of the film. This is life in one sentence (for most of us). And to remind us of this significant statement is one of the major (and more audacious) comments of the film: to experience the act of work. Are we prepared to be privileged witnesses of real labour? Above all, when it is presented as painful and noble as it is? No cover up, just hard work on beaten hands? This is cinema confronting life, thus the beginning of truth.

Huacho (which means to be an orphan of your own country), presents the complexity of the everyday lives of humble people in a remote region, who fight for a living with courage, because it is needed in order to survive. It’s a brave attitude to produce a film which rescues this way of living, totally different from a country whose face to the world is the success of capitalism. We must be the centre of our own peripheries and from that point we can re-define history.


Enrique Vivar