22/02/2025 - BERLINALE 2025: JD Fernández Molero offers up a supernatural immersion in life in the Peruvian jungle, an eerie place teetering between modern influences and age-old traditions

How did Iván (Marcelo Quino) survive? This is the core question that the entire small Peruvian town of Quillabamba is asking itself – especially his godfather, Gabriel (Ricardo Delgado), and his uncle, Hugo (Hugo Sueldo). Iván disappeared two years prior, and now, a young Matsigenka teenager from a village that lies a two-day boat ride away, Meshia (Maritza Kategari), brings him to the city since he is suffering from a severe eye infection. The eye has to come out. Meshia stays with the family. The boy, who has since gone mute and unresponsive, seems attached to her. Also, to her, life in a city, where she starts working at the family-run bar, opens up more possibilities.

This is the outset of JD Fernández Molero’s Punku [+see also:
trailer
film profile], which has had its world premiere in the Forum section of the 75th Berlinale. But the film does not simply reside within the realm of reality; rather, Fernández Molero unboxes an ethereal fever dream of a story. Ever since he lost his eye, Iván is haunted by supernatural visions: fantasies about his surroundings, a reflection of the events at large, which Fernández Molero and his DoP, Johan Carrasco Monzón, capture in grainy 8 mm and 16 mm footage. Sometimes washed out or overexposed, sometimes in black and white, it creates an image of a world nestled between two doors – or two portals, as the translation of the title Punku goes.

With Iván as the silent observer, seeming stuck between the living and the dead, much of the “living” is done by Meshia, who enrols in a local school, bartends and wants to participate in the town’s “Miss Mermaid” beauty pageant. An outsider, like Iván, the two at first spend a lot of time together. Soon enough, Meshia finds friends, a group of girls with whom she goes shopping, carries out rituals and prepares for the pageant. Fernández Molero affords the audience the occasional laugh, such as when Meshia and her colleague realise that their exotic-cum-sexy waitress outfits are just that – all for show. A display for the male gaze, with the décor having zero roots in any of the local native cultures.

But it also segues into a more sinister part of being a teenager in Peru. Wherever Meshia goes, there is lurking, staring – from the elderly men, the younger ones chasing her in cars, and even young boys hiding behind trees. While Fernández Molero does not go for the easy shock value of assault, there is a perpetual threat hanging in the air. A traditional role is inflicted upon this young woman, who may think there is more for her to do in Quillabamba, but who is succumbing to the same expectations and traditions as she would anywhere else in her home country.

Caught between performing on TikTok, seeking healers and enduring the lustful male gaze, she feels as though the eeriness of the supernatural is sometimes like a call to escape, a clash of dissociative conflicts between the old and the new, where those who can’t navigate the pitfalls are left behind. “If you leave, you leave never to come back,” a young redhead competing at the pageant recounts, drawn into the forest with a mysterious haze, as Iván once was. But breaking away, as Fernández Molero shows, is not that easy. A supernatural gateway, a portal, is more in the realm of wishful thinking than reality.

Punku was produced by Peru’s Tiempo Libre and co-produced by Spain’s Jur Jur Productions as well as JD Fernández Molero.