El enemigo principal (Jatun auka), Jorge Sanjinés, Bolivia-Peru, 1973, 103'

In June, the month of Inti Raymi, the festival of the sun, which for the northern hemisphere is also the summer solstice, comes to the Peruvian Andes. Jatum Auka (El enemigo principal) was filmed in 1973 by Bolivian director Jorge Sanjinés during his exile in Peru. The film switches between fiction and the testimony of Saturnino Huillca Quispe, who tells the story of this village, a story that is still relevant in the context of the ongoing demands of the minority communities for autonomy in their own territories. In the 1970s the main enemy was the landowner whereas today it takes the form of the extractive companies. 

Jatum Auka (El enemigo principal) stars and is narrated by the inhabitants of the village of Raqchi, in Cusco, where a landowner murders a peasant for demanding the truth about a robbery in which the peasant has been a victim. When the local community members learn about this, they demand justice from the authorities, who arbitrarily side with the landowner. With the arrival of a guerrilla group, a popular trial is organised, which entails decisions and consequences for the community. 

In this session, the Arming the Camera Film Season focuses on the work of the group UKAMAU (which means “that’s how we are”), of which Sanjinés is a founder member. The group has been an active producer of a political cinema committed to the issue of the liberation of the marginalised peoples of the Pan-Andean region for more than fifty years. This session will be accompanied by a conversation with the researcher Isabel Seguí, whose writing has made a detailed study of the work of the Ukamau group since its establishment as a collective, the participation of women in front of and behind the camera, and their artisanal production methods. 

The film will be presented by Isabel Seguí. 

Isabel Seguí holds a PhD in Film Studies from the University of St Andrews (Scotland). She is currently a Leverhulme Postdoctoral Fellow at the University of Edinburgh and from August she will join the Department of Film and Visual Culture at the University of Aberdeen, also in Scotland, as a Senior Lecturer. Her work has been published in journals in Europe and the Americas such as Feminist Media Histories, Latin American Perspectives, Sequences and Documentary Film and in numerous edited collections. Together with María Aimaretti, she co-edited the special issue of Secuencias "Ukamau Abigarrado: Nuevas miradas críticas y fuentes de investigación" (2020). And she is currently co-editing the special issue "Documentos para una historia feminista del cine latinoamericano", which will appear in 2023 in the journal Studies in Spanish and Latin American Cinemas. She is also a member of the organising committee of RAMA (Red de Investigación del Audiovisual hecho por Mujeres en América Latina) and is part of the curatorial team of the exhibition No Master Territories. Feminist Worldmaking and the Moving Image, curated by Erika Balsom and Hila Peleg, which can be visited until the end of August at the HKW Museum in Berlin (Germany).