la trinchera luminosa del presidente gonzalo

LA TRINCHERA LUMINOSA DEL PRESIDENTE GONZALO
(The Shining Trench of Chairman Gonzalo)
a film by Jim Finn, 60 minutes, 2007
SYNOPSIS
La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo is a recreation of one day at the Canto Grande prison in Peru,
following women guerrillas from the Maoist Shining Path
movement in their morning marches to their bedtime
chants. Kept isolated in their own cellblocks, the guerrillas refused to acknowledge that were imprisoned. Their
cellblocks were another front in the People’s War: “shining
trenches of combat”. This film shows the intense indoctrination and belief system of the brutal Latin American
insurgency.
WORLD PREMIERE
NEW YORK
UNDERGROUND
FILM FESTIVAL
2007
OFFICIAL SELECTION
VANCOUVER
INTERNATIONAL
FILM FESTIVAL
2007
CLOSING NIGHT
CHICAGO
UNDERGROUND
FILM FESTIVAL
2007
SELECTED PRESS
THE NEW YORKER: “...a scathing satire about young “guerrillistas,” dramatizing rituals of indoctrination and self-criticism related to Peru’s Shining Path movement.”
Robert Koehler, VARIETY: “... a strong, heady whiff of what life ruled by Maoist fanatics would
feel and sound like, and the bloody-minded absurdity of it all... pure filmmaking legerdemain.”
Quintin, OTROS CINES: “ ...an uncanny echo of the militarization of guerrilla life...”
Ed Halter, THE VILLAGE VOICE : “A crypto-retro-Marxist faux-documentation of one day in a Peruvian women’s prison populated by Shining Path Maoists... its compulsive ambition only furthers
its enigmas.”
Bill Stamets, CHICAGO SUN TIMES: “Using a low-fidelity Hi-8 camcorder from the era, Jim Finn
scrupulously stages the activities of imprisoned Shining Path revolutionaries in the late 1980s...
Women recite militant cant and review bomb-making techniques. They perform “Macbeth” for
its tactical lessons on traitors and conspiracies. Finn’s video offers an open-ended lens on female
suicide bombers in terrorist movements elsewhere in the world.
ABOUT THE DIRECTOR
“Jim Finn has made a name for himself...thanks to his feeling
for irony and his capacity to shape something new from
propaganda, news and other historic images. Not to forget
his very dry sense of humour”
- Rotterdam International Film Festival
CONTACT
www.jimfinn.org
Jim Finn 1913 5th Avenue, Troy NY 12180
773-531-4988 [email protected]
Jim Finn (b. St. Louis, 1968) is an artist whose films and
videos use humor and historical fiction to examine communist ideology, capitalism and revolutionary art practices. His work has screened at festivals, museums, and
cinematheques such as Rotterdam International, New York
Underground, Edinburgh International, Museo Reina Sofia
in Madrid, and the Harvard Film Archive. His first featurelength film Interkosmos was called “a retro gust of communist utopianism” by the Village Voice and “charming and
fantastic, so full of rare atmospheres” by Canadian filmmaker Guy Maddin. Variety called his follow-up film La Trinchera
Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo “pure filmmaking legerdemain”. He is currently working on a new film about a North
Korean art residency called The Juche Idea.
DIRECTOR’S STATEMENT
When members of the Peruvian Maoist revolutionary-terrorist group the Shining Path were captured and imprisoned, the authorities isolated them in their own cellblocks. The guerrillas thought of government prisons as just
another front in the People’s War calling them “shining trenches of combat”. The prisoners organized propaganda,
literature, and military classes as well as marches, criticism sessions, and dances. The Shining Path was known to
recruit heavily among highland Indians and women. It had the highest proportion of women commanders in Latin
American guerrilla history. One of the key roles for women, for example, was to perform the coup-de-grace on a
wounded victim.
Structured roughly along the pace and schedule of a Catholic mass, the film is filled with the esoteric rituals and
dogmatic political theology creating by their leader, the former philosophy professor Chairman Gonzalo. “La Trinchera Luminosa del Presidente Gonzalo” was shot in Hi-8 analog as if it were an amateur video made perhaps by
the prisoners themselves in the late 80s. The location for the film was the New Mexico State Fairgrounds’ 4H Youth
Dormitory in the middle of Albuquerque. We painted it with Maoist murals and cast actors in New Mexico who could
speak Spanish or Navajo (Dine’). Navajo is used because so much of the recruitment for the Shining Path was done in
among the Quechua, Ayamara and other Indian groups. Though the film is heavily researched and even uses sections
of interviews and poems from guerrillas, it is a fictional film. In this fictionalized Shining Path world, Navajo is spoken
in prison. The Navajo actors translated scenes from Macbeth into tape recorders and played it back to better the
translation and memorize the dialogue. They helped create the performance as well as the sets for the Revolutionary
Theater piece within the film. The rehearsals and choreography for the film were worked out with the help of Working Classroom, an Albuquerque theater group for artists from marginalized communities. Many of the actors were
trained there and the collaboration with the organization helped create a real sense of community on the set.
The Shining Path had a unique way of speaking based on didactic Gang-of-Four or Cultural-Revolution Maoism and
Gonzalo-Thought, basically the sayings of their leader Guzman. The script is based on a core of interviews, readings
and other research which was turned into a stylized version of a day in the life of the cellblock. The music for the
film was created before filming by the same musicians that scored my film Interkosmos. I wanted the actors to be
surrounded by the language, literature, art and music of the Shining Path to portray the characters as authentically
as possible. I was drawn into making this film to try to understand how a 16-year-old Indian girl becomes a trained
killer versed in Marxist rhetoric and willing to go to any lengths for a future society of great harmony. Though set in
the late 80s, a movie about terrorist extremists locked away and forgotten in prison with nothing but their ideology
has a relevance that doesn’t seem to be fading any time soon. The extreme violence and ideological dogmatism of
the Shining Path was seen at the time as an aberration among Latin American guerrilla groups, but now it seems that
they were more in line with 21st-century guerrilla tactics.
PRINCIPAL CAST
Magali Arreola
Yazmin Chavez
Gabriela Mayorga
Amanda Louis
Rebeca Mayorga
Denisse del Rio
Isela Cruz
Sophina James
PRINCIPAL CREW
Writer/Director
Art Directors
Camera
Assistant Director
Costume
Music
Jim Finn
Mike Slattery, Joe Bristol
Dean DeMatteis
Cat Mazza
Dana Carter, Cecilia Rubalcava
Jim Becker, Colleen Burke
ABOUT THE MUSIC
The music for the film was created by Jim Becker and Colleen Burke. Besides writing and touring with his band Califone,
Jim Becker most recently has toured with the bands Freakwater and the Dirty Three. As well as founding and playing
piano in the band We Ragazzi, Colleen Burke has toured with Smog. They collaborated on the soundtrack for Interkosmos
in 2006.