State of Fear
DIR Pamela Yates | USA - Peru | 2005 | 94 min
SHOWTIMES:
Fri. Sept. 30 | 1:40pm | Granville5
Mon. Oct. 10 | 7:15pm | Granville2
Wed. Oct.12 | 6:00pm | Granville
Reviewed by Hugo Passarello Luna
Peru’s last twenty 20 years have a long, bloody stream of violence - their own 'war on terror'. Attempting to create a socialist order for Peru, Sendero Luminoso (leader of the Shining Path communist guerrilla movement) installed a systematic, nation-wide climate of death and fear. Soon the Peruvian army joined and perpetuated this state of fear with its own terror tactics.
This documentary is a study of the scars and fear lingering in Peruvian society today. "In the age of terror, this could have happened anywhere," explains the narrator, linking the next 90 minutes of images to our current state of affairs.
As a whole, the documentary is a valuable look at memory, not only for Peruvians but for all Latin Americans, and perhaps the world. The film's main weakness is its narrative structure which is confusing at times. We move from Shining Path’s stories of violence to those of the Army and, closer to the end, accounts of politicians’ corruption. Even though there are links between all of them, the film never lets us know what exactly those links are.
The editing is far from successful, with amateurish superimpositions and the (incomprehensible) repetition of interviewees names (which paused the film every time they appeared) even after they were already introduced three times.
The obvious questions are raised: aren’t we living through the same thing now? Is George W. Bush like Alberto Fujimori? Without even mentioning these issues, the filmmakers make the audience connect these two eras.
The sense you get from the film is that fear does not vanishes with the threat of terrorism; it stays with us and grows, creating a dangerously deep culture of fear in society living.