Pathbreakers of Peruvian Fiction Cinema

Peruvian cinema has achieved unprecedented prominence in recent years among scholars, critics, and spectators, winning accolades at prestigious global events. And yet the contribution to this success by women remains largely unacknowledged. This essay examines the work of two of the most prominent of these filmmakers. Globally renowned Claudia Llosa has crafted a body of work that takes on female-focused themes such as coming of age (Madeinusa, 2005), sexual violence (La Teta Asustada, The Milk of Sorrow 2008), and motherhood (Aloft, 2014 and Distancia de rescate, Fever Dream 2021), in the context of contamination, failure, and abandonment. Melina León’s multi-award-winning debut feature Canción sin nombre (Song without a Name 2019) tells of the desperate search by a young Andean woman from the Andes for her daughter, stolen at birth. Through analyzing the presentation, by women, of trauma and desire in these films, this essay thus seeks to show how their female protagonists are inscribed on our screens as complex subjects with agency.