>> Catalog 2015

I Still Being (Kachkaniraqmi)

Sigo siendo (Kachkaniraqmi)

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PERU, SPAIN / 2013 / Spanish, Quechua, Shipibo / Color / DCP / 120 min

Director, Script, Photography, Editing, Sound: Javier Corcuera
Production Company: Nakuy Producciones
World Sales: Quechua Films

This is a record of provincial music made on a journey through three regions of Peru—Ayacucho in the highlands, Amazonas in the Amazon valley, and the coastal area where Lima is located—to listen to the voices and songs of the local people. This trip to unknown remote areas of Peru reveals the diversity of its people, and draws you to the rich music they play. Against the outstanding beauty of the landscape in the frame, we can see ordinary people at the mercy of history. Javier Corcuera shows admiration for the identity of his home country Peru, where a variety of ethnicities continue to pass down their traditions.

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[Director’s Statement] I Still Being (Kachkaniraqmi) is a film about a hidden country.

I was born in Peru and lived the most important part of my life in Lima, that great city where families came from all corners of the country. Millions of people move to this coastal capital leaving their communities, their culture, their sounds. The great migration that began in the forties and fifties became Lima and its slums, a place of refuge for the other Peru, who came looking for a better life. Here they found a new life but not always what they sought.

This film talks about those people who moved to the big city and never broke off from their identity, continued singing in their language, maintained a unique way of playing the guitar, violin, harp, cajón, a way to tell stories, to say who they are. From music and from the great masters of our music, the film tells the diversity of Peruvian culture, the complexity of the country, its past and its present.

This is a story of return, back to the seed. The characters go home, where they wrote their first songs, travel to the heart of the Andean world, their African ancestors, the rivers of the Amazon where some were born.

This film is also a debt to a country I left behind, a place to tell and sing about.