Luis Figueroa Yábar

Kukuli, a young llama herder, leaves her grandparents in the countryside of Cusco to attend the Feast of Mamacha Carmen in the town of Paucartambo.

The Virgin of Candelaria is associated with Pachamama, or Mother Earth, Lake Titicaca, mines, and lightning. An impressive variety of dances are performed during the first two weeks of February. The festival takes place within the context of carnivals, the rainy season, ritual competitions, and courtship.

A constant element linked to the bull is water. This animal is said to emerge from the depths of an enchanted lagoon. It is a dangerous, almost demonic animal. All these attributes are similar to those of the Amaru in pre-Hispanic times. This explains why both images merged. The counterpart of the Amaru is the celestial Condor. The latter is said to be Machu Inca, or the old Inca. In the Andean dualistic scheme, the Condor represents the upper world, and the superimposition of the condor and the bull illustrates the balance of two complementary opposites that Andean people constantly reiterate to express their sense of integration or unity of the social body.

Dramatic testimony of Gregorio Condori Mamani, who works as a porter in Cusco, Peru. Despite the huge effort they make everyday for a few coins, porters fall and find death in the streets.

A group of Central-American teen-agers depart from the slums of Guatemala City escaping poverty and violence, towards the promised land of California.

The We and the I is the heartfelt and comical story of the final bus ride home for a group of young high school students and graduates.

During the course of our era, a major pre-Hispanic civilization, now called the Moche, developed on the northern coast of Peru, flourishing as the Roman Empire declined, a thousand years before the Inca civilization emerged. The film reconstructs the various aspects of the social and romantic life of the Moche people, based on their rich pottery.

It is a masterpiece of Cusco's popular creativity, where the saints come to life. The Corpus Christi celebration in June is a solstice festival, coinciding with a ceremonial time in the Andes. Just as in the Inca past the ancient mummies were carried in procession, today the images of saints and virgins serve as emblems of current social groups.