La Memoria de las Mariposas (The Memory of the Butterflies)

The starting point for Tatiana Fuentes Sadowski’s cinematic journey into the past is an old photograph of two Indigenous men. Around 1900, they were taken to London to be “civilised”: Omarino and Aredomi – little is known about them beyond their names. Sadowski follows their traces, deconstructing the history of the colonial rubber trade in Latin America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries. Through black-and-white Super 8 footage that blends almost chameleon-like into a montage of archival material and historical photographs, the film constructs a counter-narrative to colonial history, while Sadowski also reflects on her own position as a filmmaker. Rather than confining her investigation to the archive, she takes the photograph to Indigenous communities in present-day Peru, including the descendants of Omarino and Aredomi, and documents Indigenous activism today.

La Memoria de las Mariposas brings lost and overlooked histories to light – those of a generation whose lives were devastated by the rubber boom – and makes space for the ghosts of the past beyond the boundaries of official remembrance.