17/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski’s debut feature is an essay film that makes intelligent use of archive images, offering an alternate vision of the Peruvian colonial period

Presented in the Forum section of the 75th Berlinale, The Memory of Butterflies [+see also:
interview: Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski
film profile] by Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski reflects on the painful colonial past in the Amazon, in particular in the Rio Putumayo region, rich in rubber tree and theatre to a genocide perpetrated against indigenous populations, used as slaves by the powerful merchant Julio Cesar Arana. The film is made up of reprocessed Super 8 images and footage from various archives, for instance from the British Film Institute, as well as films also shot from an extractive perspective, such as Amazonas, o maior rio do mundo (1922) by Portuguese director Silvino Santos. This latter film, which was thought to be lost, was recently rediscovered at the Národní filmový archive in Prague. One of the tasks that The Memory of Butterflies gives itself is precisely that of revealing, thanks to these images, how they themselves are part of this system of exploitation of raw materials that produced the rubber boom in Brazil and in Peru in the first years of the 20th century.

In particular, Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski starts from the few photographs of Omarino and Aredomi, two indigenous people brought to Europe by lawyer Roger Casement to denounce the slavery of which the local population was a victim. This round trip becomes the main track in a film that, thanks to its editing, goes in different directions, touching the exposed nerves of a colonial past that a wide range of works (mostly originating from South America, but not only) are taking care to tell, often from different points of view that oppose the hegemonic discourse. And so even the humanitarian examples of the more progressive part of the European bourgeoisie, here embodied by the Irish revolutionary Casement, reveal themselves to be one of the thousand faces of colonialism. At the same time, the director, who also narrates the film, intertwines the story of Omarino and Aredomi with her personal experience as the mother of a descendant of one of the families who benefited most from the rubber boom. This complexity of visions and questions, arising from the desire to analyse and understand such a heavy past, mixes with the cultural heritage of the genocide survivors and with their ways of relating to history.

Fuentes Sadowkski’s visual experiments offer the spectator another form of thinking, one that is intricate and intuitive. It’s a film that tends to give space to more voices, which are the reverse shot of the official story, its repressed part. That this operation was accomplished using archival images shot originally with the opposite purpose, namely that of cataloguing a population and oppressing it, demonstrates how the language of cinema still has the capacity to subvert the predominant narrative, placing itself as a tool for knowledge and struggle.

The Memory of Butterflies was produced by Miti Film (Peru) with Perpetua Cine (Peru) and Oblaum Filmes (Portugal).

(Translated from Italian)

Photogallery 17/02/2025: Berlinale 2025 - The Memory of Butterflies

6 pictures available. Swipe left or right to see them all.

{0} of {1}

Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski
© 2024 Dario Caruso for Cineuropa - dario-caruso.fr, @studio.photo.dar, Dario Caruso