Eduardo Mendoza de Echave

Lima, Peru, 1991. After years of fruitless efforts, a group of police officers finally find a lead on the whereabouts of Abimael Guzmán, the bloodthirsty leader of the communist terrorist gang Shining Path.

It tells the love triangle between Cristina, Javier (her future husband) and Felipe (her ex of a lifetime). After her bachelorette party organized by her best friend Catalina of hers, Cristina discovers that she is pregnant, and she does not know which of the two is her father. In the fourth month of pregnancy, the doctor gives them the results of the paternity test, giving an unexpected twist to the story.

A current of thought unites the three episodes in a coherent way, embodied with few elements, and that makes of space, time, and movement, purely cinematographic modes of expression. Voice is not needed. Yes there are sounds, music, but not human voices, as in primitive cinema. There are faces, slow or fast movements, despair, fatality, a barely glimpsed horror, desire and fear of freedom. There is also love, perhaps as an illusion, rather than as a reality.

Julia inherited her mother Asunta’s job as a domestic worker in the wealthy De la Puente household, where she was raised alongside the family’s daughters. Asunta, an Andean woman who migrated to Lima after Peru’s 1970 earthquake, carried a life shaped by displacement, silence, and sacrifice. Over the years, affection and inequality became inseparably intertwined within the household. Now, as illness and old age expose long-buried secrets, Julia is forced to confront the invisible social order that has defined her existence. Torn between loyalty and freedom, she must decide whether to remain in the role imposed on her or finally reclaim her own identity.

Life is a gift, life grants you gifts, but everyone has, within him, the seed of his own downfall: his gold tooth. In the end comes tragedy: an everlasting toothache.

Three lives in search of redemption intersect in the streets of Lima: undercover cop Gamarra’s desperate attempts to save his wife from a terminal illness gets him into trouble; bus driver Felix wants to be accepted into a religious sect after his involvement in a tragic traffic accident; and imperiled soccer club leader Narciso tries to secure his younger brother’s release from prison.

Ella – well she has a name too – Luna (Patricia Garza), is actually about her much older husband and painter Alfredo (Paul Vega), and his choice of actions/reactions after she decides to leave him for a lover that he wasn’t aware of. Alberto has been going through a creative crisis and is under pressure to complete a series of paintings for a forthcoming show. It is nevertheless also plain to see that he’d been treating Luna, who’s also his model, largely as an object of desire and obsession – capturing with camera her every movement in the house when she’s not posing for him, and memorising her every physical feature, moles and warts included – he’d apparently counted twenty seven moles on her body. When Alfredo tracks down and entraps the lover she’d wanted to elope with (Rómulo Assereto), he’ll discover that they both have more in common than merely desiring the same woman…

Four years after their crazy night of escapades, Manuel, Efrain, and El Gordo's friendship has survived well into their college years. Now, living together they decide to throw an end of summer party to rival all parties. What they don't know is that Bibiana, an escort from Manuel's past comes back to stir things up, forcing them to make decisions that they may not be prepared to make.