The Anatomy of the Horses [+lire aussi :
critique
interview : Daniel Vidal Toche
fiche film], the feature debut by Daniel Vidal Toche (trained at ECAM and author of the medium-length film Out of Here), picked up the Best Cinematography and Best Production Design Awards at the 22nd Seville European Film Festival (see the news). Below, he tells us more about this Peruvian-shot film.

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Cineuropa: Shooting in such special locations must have been complicated.
Daniel Vidal Toche: It’s a very beautiful and harsh place, which is tough to shoot in. In those locations, depending on how you film them, they can look idyllic because the sun is beautiful, but you don’t always manage to convey the harshness of the mountain. We endured the cold and the low pressure of the altitude there, and we had to figure out how to make the place feel raw. It came down to decisions on colour, where to place the camera and the format.

That 4:3 format conveys the oppression the characters have to endure.
Yes, because a widescreen frame pushed it towards postcard territory; the verticality gave us something very interesting in relation to the sky, and this film closes in on the characters.

How did you approach the structure of a movie that unfolds in two different time frames?
It’s something that derived from the film’s own language. Quechua handles temporal relations differently; it’s neither a linear culture nor a linear language. In the West, we posit an inevitable progression; arithmetic has completely hemmed us in. But in Quechua culture, that arithmetic doesn’t exist; it’s a spiral of things that keep returning... The future is behind you in Quechua culture. I heard this there: the past is in front because you can see it and relate to it. The future doesn’t exist, therefore you can’t relate to it. I believe you can actually transform the past. And that is extremely necessary in Peru, where there are few visions of the future, because we haven’t even founded the basis of ourselves; there is no "we". And in Quechua culture, there is: from there springs hope that something can be founded or altered, or that a "we" can be created. From these notions, we will oppose that linearity, progress and the enlightened/economic idea that formed the foundation of this country. And we’re going to reconceptualise it from a perspective in which we can think of ourselves anew, with that temporal relationship serving as the film’s structure. It was complex, but after spending time immersed in that culture, it came naturally.

The film’s rituals and Quechua language immerse viewers deeply in Peruvian culture.
It’s a total immersion and a way for me to relate to it. I’m from a different Peru, from Lima, from a classist and racist society that distances you from the mountain that appears in my movie. Eight million people speak Quechua, but on the coast, we don’t know a single word of it. There, there is no relationship with such a widely spoken language. When you start asking yourself why and you draw near to those places, you discover there’s something we haven’t fully engaged with. In Peru, we come from continuous political crises and a lack of representation. Many people were killed while I was preparing the shoot - some were shot from helicopters, by the police and by the military. Nothing has come of this. Under the new president, they killed one young man and left another in a vegetative state. And they don’t shoot at well-off people from Lima, but at people in places where they think there will be no consequences. In Peru, there’s capitalism with no mediation from a state that is completely disinterested, and the market doesn’t hesitate for one second to leave a community without water.

Environmentalism is one of your film’s themes.
It cannot be that a gold-mining company, located at the headwaters of a Peruvian river where I shot, uses practices that are no longer legal in order to separate metals. They turn it into a yellow, radioactive river that causes mutations in animals and the presence of metals in the blood of the valley’s population, wiping out any form of economic development, with zero benefit for the locals. The only ones who benefit are a single family that doesn’t contribute to the country’s economic development either.