Paraíso

On the outskirts of Lima, the Jardínes del Paraíso slum. Héctor Gálvez’s first fiction film’s impetus originated in a video workshop organised in the neighbourhood and the encounter between the director and the teenagers who would become the main characters of a film fuelled by their lives and the traumatic memories of the civil war their parents had to flee. Here, in the invasive dust of this neighbourhood of displaced people, the hypothesis of economic outcome seems as obstructed as Lima is distant. Yet it is the still-beating heart of its youth and the desire to ward off its isolation that the film chases with a sensitivity void of complacency. JB

Participation in the 2005 Nantes Produire au Sud Workshop