The director of Armenian origin, Atom Egoyan, author of films such as “Family viewing” (1987), “The sweet hereafter” (1996) and “Ararat” (2002), held last Thursday a meeting with young indigenous filmmakers from Ayacucho and the Central Amazon. Egoyan came to our country to receive a tribute in the framework of the twenty-first edition of the Lima Film Festival.

The dialogue was organized by the Canadian Embassy in Peru with the collaboration of Oxfam and CHIRAPAQ, Center for Indigenous Cultures. This alliance, with the participation of the Wapikoni Mobile studios, has been promoting an initiative in audiovisual training for Andean and Amazonian youths for three years, who seek to show their reality and culture through the big screen.

“The power of cinema is to make us understand other forms of life that exist,” said the Oscar nominee and laureate at Cannes. After seeing a selection of short films produced by these young Egoyan highlighted the depth of the audiovisual narrative developed and encouraged them to continue in this effort. “You do something miraculous,” he said.

“The challenge of showing the fabric and the harvest, showing people who do things by investing a lot of their own spirit, forces us to fill the films with the same spirit. Filmmakers can not be just observers. We must be able to work with the same level of detail as the artisan or the farmer. That’s what makes a movie special“, he said.